


Belladonna

by BlueMoonHound



Series: Buttercups and Belladonna [2]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Angst with a Hopeful Ending, Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Marijuana, Memory Alteration, Panic Attacks, Poison, Self-Harm, Suicide Attempt, relic thrall, taakitz in a later chapter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-03
Updated: 2018-03-02
Packaged: 2019-03-12 21:17:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 14
Words: 26,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13555752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueMoonHound/pseuds/BlueMoonHound
Summary: Arsenic is just one of many slow poisons in the world.





	1. Introduction

**Author's Note:**

> SO excited to finally get this up!  
> Sequel to [Buttercups](http://archiveofourown.org/works/13172022/chapters/30127167).
> 
> \---  
> Major character death tag is for Maureen. No one else dies(permanently, since the century exists), I promise. Figured I'd mention that now that I'm adding the attempted suicide tag.

Her feet make a soft crunching noise on the gravel road, the only sound for ages, for miles. She's starting to flag. Lucretia holds Taako a little tighter, thankful for a simple spell that made him lighter.

She's weighted down. Exhaustion chases her partly because she has been breaking down, every few hours. Her mind wanders. It goes downhill again, as she adjusts Taako's head against her shoulder again and notices those eye bags. He lost Lup. Lup is gone. He lost all his memories. He'll wake up, and he won't know who she is. Her fingers tremble, and she swallows back a sob.

She's almost to town. She can't do this yet. She can wait, it can wait. If she's going to become who she wants to be, she needs to corral her emotions like a sheepdog herding its flock.

Taako groans.

 _I'm almost to town_ , she thinks, and she picks up the pace, because the last thing she needs is for Taako to wake up in her arms, and get an idea of what she looks like, and make assumptions, think all sorts of bad things. So many bad things. She doesn't need that, so she walks as fast as she can. She can feel her muscles moving under her skin, and it's unnerving, but she keeps going.

She reaches town, before Taako wakes up and everything. There's a few things she prepared ahead of time-- two rooms, a custom-made travelling kart emblazoned with “Sizzle it up with Taako,” and a a meal for herself, in the hotel dining area. She's leaving Taako with one hundred gold pieces she transmuted out of trash before submitting the journals to Fisher. They're in a little bag in his pocket.

She almost sobs again, because she realizes he's going to think he stole them. No, no, these are his, they belong to him. She wishes she could reassure him. She's never been able to in the past.

She'll write him a letter, she decides.

“Uh, the reservations should be filed under Taako and Lucretia,” She mumbles to the desk person at the hotel.

They hand her the keys. “Is that Taako?”

“Why do you care? I booked the rooms.”

The person shrugs. She hurries up the stairs. Fuck stairs, she wishes the only open rooms hadn't been on the third floor.

Taako had been the hardest to take care of, too, save Davenport, because with Merle and Magnus she knew they'd just be happy to stay in one place, to start from scratch. Taako, a traveler who focused on the material, would be happy with neither of those things. It had been a more elaborate ordeal to set up a new life for Taako.

She tucks him into the hotel bed, puts the key on the table, and leaves him alone.

“Goodbye,” She whispers as she closes the door behind her.

 

It doesn't take long for Lucretia to shudder into pieces. She sobs, curled against the rough fabric of the hotel bedsheets, letting the world sink down to the strictly sensory. She feels like her skin is going to come off of her body. Her fingers weave into the grain of the wool underneath her and wet tracks down her cheeks. It smells old and dusty in the hotel, not in a bad way. The bedsheets smell vaguely of lavender. She hiccups, the sound radiating through her head.

She gathers herself, focusing on what she can feel. Someone walks down the hall. The reminder that yes, this is a building with other people in it, sends a wave of fear through her. She can't be found, no one can know that she was crying. She's not even sure where that emotion comes from. Instead, she forces herself to stand, to change out of her travelling clothes, to wash her face.

She climbs back under the covers, letting the exhaustion she had been holding back roll over her again. She hopes she won't sleep too much. Yes, she's given all the living crew a new place, some sort of starting point, but Davenport is still on the Starblaster, waiting. She needs to walk back tomorrow. She needs to cry as little as possible.

Hopefully it'll help that she won't be cradling Taako in her arms.

 

Taako has a hangover. That's the only explanation he can come to. He splashes water on his face, stares at his own expression in the mirror. It's gaunt, sleepy. He's got humongous eye bags that he can't focus on too hard – his brain fogs up when he tries to remember why he wasn't sleeping very well. He supposes it doesn't matter. There's a hundred gold in his pocket, a room key in his hand.

He wanders back into his room, plopping down on the bed. He notices a note on the bedside table and picks it up, assuming it's going to be breakfast details and bullshit hotel things. It's not. It's a letter.

 

_Hello, Taako._

_I'm writing this letter to inform you that your new cooking carriage is waiting outside. You will probably need to find a driver in town. Hopefully, the gold I left with you is enough to pay for that and breakfast at the inn._

_I'm sorry about the late night. I hope you're feeling alright. Best of luck with your cooking show._

_L._

 

He frowns, folds the letter, and puts it in his pants pocket. Doesn't mean anything to him. Nothing means much of anything to him, not even the clothes he's wearing. Normal ass travelling clothes, he supposes. The shirt is violet, though, an unconventional color for a traveler. He remembers travelling a lot when he was a kid, but he had a steady job as a chef for a bit.

He's forgotten a lot of things. He rubs the space between his eyes and decides to go ask the inkeeper how many nights he has this room for. Fuck L for not including that in the letter. Whoever L is. A proprietor? Some cute guy he picked up at a bar last night? A custom cart maker? He doesn't know. He supposes it doesn't really matter.

When he gets downstairs, the inkeeper looks a little relieved to see him up and about. “You looked real bad yesterday, Mister Taako. I trust you're feeling better.”

“Still got seven hells of a headache, m'dude,” Taako says. “Hey, d'you know how many nights I got in this place? Whoever left me didn't say in their letter.”

“The lady who dropped you off booked you for two nights, sir.”

“Shit, it was a lady?” Taako laughs. Well, that rules out one possibility. He can't imagine hooking up with a woman. He's had some relationships with women before, or at least he thinks he has- what even kind of relationships? He can't remember- but his default isn't that end of the spectrum. “What did she look like?”

“Tall. Formidable,” The inkeeper shrugs. “She left an hour ago.”

Taako huffs. “Shame. Woulda liked to meet her.” He looks around. “D'you guys serve food around here?”

“Breakfast is open for one more hour, Sir,” he says. “Behind you.”

“Thanks.”

“Have a nice day.”

“You too,” Taako grins, giving fingerguns. He backs into the dining area and almost bumps into a server. “Hwoops!” He turns around, focusing on the world in front of him.

He'll be fine.


	2. Chapter 2

“Saz,” Taako says, peering out the window. Someone's coughing. “Saz, they're dying.” His hands shake. He puts away another pan. “We- We have to go.”

Sazed looks at him like he's making a decision. “Run away from this?”

“Sazed, I don't want to go to prison, do you? Get us the fuck _out_ of here. Now.” Taako makes a shooing motion. He puts away the garlic.

Sazed scrambles.

Something about the poison feels wrong. Like it's three or four inches left of what it should be. He's not even sure what that could possibly mean, since he has no memory of dealing with poisons before. Certainly not firsthand. He's no assassin. That's, well, fine, because his memory is shit.

He pauses, putting a hand against the wall.

The cart rattles under him. He leans against the door and stares at nothing.

A voice rises through the feeling of movement, pushes him to attention.

“Taako.”

“Hm?”

“The hell did you fucking do?”

“What do you mean, kemosabe?”

The cart rolls to a stop. “What did you put in the fucking chicken?” Sazed climbs into the carriage. “You know. What the fuck did you do that got forty people coughing up blood?”

His hands are on his hips. His eyes shine in the light, reflective almost like an elf's but not quite enough. Half-elves are unsettling, Taako realizes. He frowns.

“I-- well-- the garnish, maybe?” His voice squeaks. “Maybe it was the garnish.”

He recalls something about belladonna, but it chases itself away.

Something about hallucinogens. Something about delayed effect. His head hurts. Taako curls up on the floor, wrapped in his bedsheets, and weeps silently. There's no way he can continue his cooking show after this. Not that it ever felt quite right. It's off, it's all off, his life is set five inches to the left of where it ought to be.

 

The road rolls away underneath them, and Taako lets his head bounce against the back door of the cart as they travel. He watches the pans over the washbasin bang back and forth against the cabinets. It's hypnotizing. Time doesn't feel real.

The pans stop bouncing at some point. Taako blinks, and Sazed is in front of him.

“Taako.”

“Hey, Sazzy.”

“Oh good, you're not doing the fucking thing again.” Sazed sits back on his heels. “Need you here. Needa figure out where we're even going.”

Sazed gets up and starts across the little room, yanking a map down from a top shelf. He throws it on the table that Taako had cut up the chicken on – whenever they were in glamour springs. He's struck with the image of half a dozen children crowding around the window of the cart, and he swallows around something gross in his throat.

He pushes himself to his feet and the world rocks like the cart is still moving. He blinks tiredness from his eyes and wanders towards the table, leaning on it. “You've been driving, Saz,” Taako says. “You'll know where we are better than I will.”

“We're here,” Sazed says. He points to a little road in the middle of nowhere. It's a good two day's ride from Glamour Springs, even at a fast pace. Taako chews the inside of his lip, pricking his skin. The blood feels good in his mouth.

There's a town about ten miles away, but Taako doesn't know shit about it and he's only sure they can't take the cart there.

“We needa get rid of the cart,” Taako says. “Then we can walk to town, yeah?”

“Fuck, Taako, are you some sort of con artist?”

Taako shrugs. He doesn't have an answer. “It'll work,” he says.

“Are you bleeding?”

“Yeah?”

“Elves are so fucking weird.”

Taako looks Sazed in the eyes, just for a moment. Then his eyes fall away. Taako feels faint, all of a sudden, and sits down on the floor. His head hits the table but he finds that he doesn't care. It's dark out, he realizes. Sazed must have had a lantern.

“Gods almighty, Taako. Go to fucking sleep.”

Taako grumbles, but he's too exhausted to tell Sazed off for ordering him around. In fact, the exhaustion is washing over him in great waves, pulling him towards sleep right there on the floor. He doesn't want to sleep on the floor. He'll wake up with a backache if he does that. He forces himself to get up and lie down on the bed.

It's not much better, but his tired body doesn't give two fucks. He passes out.

His dreams smell like garlic. He dreams about running with someone cradled in his arms, about fear and fog and death. He wakes up to static, only a few hours later.

The cart is gone. Somehow, in the minuscule amount of time he was asleep, someone had managed to yoink their cart out from under them. He had thought Sazed would have stayed awake, but no, apparently not-- or at least, that's what he thinks till he looks around, and realizes Sazed is gone.

Taako shivers, and he tells himself it's because he's cold. He fishes in his pocket and finds thirty gold pieces, enough for some food but not a night at most inns. He chews his lip again, reopening yesterday's wound. He remembers being a little kid, on the road, drinking rabbit's blood as fuel. Half the memory is foggy. He doesn't remember liking rabbits. He told, _someone_.

He packs up his camp, moving on autopilot. On what he knows, even if he shouldn't. He puts away everything and takes what he can carry in the direction of the town he'd pointed out yesterday.

It only takes a few hours for Taako's feet to get sore, but he doesn't stop. He stops at a stream and drinks some of the water there. It's colder than he expected, making him shiver a little when he puts it to his face. What time of year is it, anyway? Spring? Hah, springs. Glamour springs. He can't stop a smile from making its way onto his face, but he can shut it down just as fast as it appeared.

There's an ache in him. It's not the numbness of knowing he poisoned a buncha people, or the anger at Sazed. It's an ache about the woods, about the wild. It feels nostalgic, almost. It certainly tugs at him.

Taako just watches the stream bubble for a little while, then gets up and keeps walking.

It's nostalgic, for sure, walking through the woods. He remembers climbing over rocks. He remembers how disproportionate his ears were. They were huge, he remembers someone else laughing and tugging at them, scolding him for how long his hair is – he can't remember who. In fact, he has to stop thinking about it. He ties his hair back in a long braid and loops it over his shoulder. He looks like a pretty standard sun elf, right? He won't be recognized. Blonde hair, gold eyes, and dark skin aren't unusual traits. He doesn't have any unusual traits.

For once, Taako's glad he looks _average_.

He's glad, because when he reaches town, he can walk up to a newsstand and call himself Lupa (it just feels right) and give himself the lightest glamour ever and no one knows a thing. He can sit on a streetcorner and flip through the news till he finds what he's looking for.

FORTY DEAD IN GLAMOUR SPRINGS – POISON?

He shuts the paper. He doesn't need to know anything more. He reaches into his pockets, counts his money again, and then heads for the bar.

Back to his youth. Get smashed, get laid, steal. That's just how it is anymore.

He knows it can't last forever, but at least it can work for now.

 

There was a cafe on the corner of the street. It was the only cafe in the whole town, because it was a tiny town, albeit a bustling town – and it was a cafe that smelled like bread and pens and sometimes garlic, because the old man who ran the cafe always smelled like garlic, and when he came downstairs and gave out free samples of bread on the street to the children, garlic was in the air.

Lucretia was one of those small children, before that little town got eaten alive by the big black beast in the sky. Lucy was a little girl who came wandering down the street on Saturdays. She always accepted that little piece of bread, and then went inside, and sat by the window, and wrote in a little journal.

Lucretia was an odd child who lived on a poor little scrap of farmland just outside town. Rumors always ran around the town about how her parents didn't take care of their few children, because they didn't have the money, or maybe they were just bad people. No one could decide, and Lucretia wasn't telling – she just came into town and sat down with her legs swinging. Her big brown eyes watched like an owl watches a fox, waiting for it to leave so it can catch the mice which were scurrying about beneath its legs. Mice that only Lucretia sees, with her big brown eyes.

Poor little Lucy Maryam wasn't the only strange Saturday visitor to the cafe, though. There was a man who lived closer to town center, one who smelled kinda like dirt and bad things, who would sit down across from her at three in the afternoon and nurse a coffee.

Lucretia thought nothing of it. She wrote about the dirt under his fingers, about the way he sometimes had cuts on his face and arms. She drew him, sometimes, because he was mercurial, and each time she drew him it was a little different. Maybe one day, if she lined up all her pictures of him, she could flip through them and watch him change.

He never disturbed her, so she figured it was fine. She'd heard rumors – she knew there was something sinister about the man, something that the other kids thought was scary. She'd heard the rumors. She knew what a predator was, in terms of animals, but not people. And she ran away when she was fifteen anyway, and never got the short end of the stick.

When she was little, when she used to sit across from the man in the cafe and watch him drink his coffee, he'd seemed comforting to her. Sinister, and perhaps dangerous, but necessary and regular and good. He didn't hurt her, not once. She heard about that later. She learned what a predator was later, and now, looking at the tiny, dogeared pages of her old notebook, it makes her gut twist. He was like a poison, the sort that you feed to someone slowly till they die. Like arsenic, perhaps.

But that childhood feeling-- she feels it again, as she wrenches the bulwark staff from the hands of the corpse that had stolen it from her, as she wins the little battle of wits she needs to overcome it. She knows the staff is dangerous, but in her hands, it's fine.

She runs her fingers into the wood grain of the staff. It sings her a little song about safety, one she'd heard her mother sing when she was seven. The man from the cafe wouldn't have known that song. The staff does know the song.

Lucretia stands up a little straighter. She took a beating in that fight, but now she has her actual staff, her real staff, a staff with more power than her old folding one ever had. It's much better. She leans against a tree to catch her breath.

 

“What's your name?”

“Charles.”

Lucretia blinked at him. She had just finished drawing his left hand. Today, it has a little blood on it. It doesn't look like it's his own. She wrote his name down in the margins. “Why do you like the cafe, Charles?”

“It's warm.”

She hummed to herself. That's why she liked the cafe, too. It was warm. There's a certain amount of safety in a public place like that, too, at midday on a Saturday. She unclicked her pen and hopped down off the chair.

She didn't say goodbye.

 

She wipes some sweat off her brow, hiking back home. The staff is still warm in her hand. She wonders if it's going to stay warm forever, but she's not sure if it matters, because it's just good to have it back.

Maybe the staff isn't poison. Maybe the poison is in Lucretia, in the way she is. She took from those who loved her, after all. She slid an insipid and cloying lack into their minds, their lives. And she's immune, immune to herself, immune to her own power, just because of luck.

She's not sure if it's good luck or bad luck.

Davenport greets her at the door. His tail wags ferociously. She wishes, not for the first time, that he would act less like a dog.

“Davenport?”

She puts the base of the staff against the floor with a thud. He looks it up and down, his face contorting a little, but he doesn't reach out to take it. Lucretia is thankful. She wants to keep the staff by her side, because it's dangerous. What would happen if it fell out of her hands again? She's not sure, and she doesn't want to know.

Instead of leaning it against the wall like she would with a normal staff, she puts it in a demiplane. It vanishes in a moment and she seals the plane behind her. Air rushes with a quiet clap into the space where it had been.

“Do you want potatoes?” She asks Davenport.

“Davenport!”

She chuckles, and reaches for the top shelf.

First mission down, and she's back in one piece. It feels pretty good. The potatoes smell like her mother's garden. She remembers digging potatoes out from under the wooden borders of the plots, having to reset the boundaries because those wily little roots liked to work their way under.

She washes them with a plain pigs hair brush and chops them for frying. She knows her cooking skills have nothing on Taako's, but she's learned to live with her tiny morsel of knowledge, mostly for Davenport's sake. She doesn't know what he would do without her, and she doesn't care to, either, because she's sure it would be bad.

“Do you want some wine?” She asks, pouring peas into the pan with the potatoes. She's pretty sure that's not how she should cook them, but at least then everything's cooked.

Davenport puts his hands on the cupboards. “Davenport!”

His tail is still wagging. He hops up and down a little as she grabs some glasses from the top shelf. She fills his with water, because she doesn't know how much he's drunk today. It's a practiced routine-- Davenport can handle wine, even if he does act like a child now, and she thinks he knows why she always gives him a glass of water, first. He putters over to the little kitchen table and puts his wineglass down next to his plate.

She doesn't drink a glass of water first. She hasn't drunk any water all day, but she honestly does not care enough to take care of herself, most of the time. She spends enough energy just getting herself to eat.

On the ship, Davenport would have taken the smallest ration out of the crew. Here, though, splitting two potatoes and a handful of peas between them, she makes sure he has enough to eat before even considering her own serving. She sips her wine and picks at her potatoes in silence. It's companionable enough, since Davenport can't speak. She's gotten used to that. She hopes the practice she gets reigning herself in here will help her later, when she needs to be quiet, or to hide her emotions from plain sight.

She supposes she's probably a little bit of poison to Davenport, too, just the way the man at the cafe was for her, or the way the relics are to the world. One down, though. One down, six to go.

It's not like the bulwark staff can do anything to her, anymore, anyway. She beat it, she controls it now. Nothing it says can convince her to submit to its thrall.

_Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me._

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can only break my will.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> some casually implied sexual content in this one. Could be said to be dubcon, because they're both drunk. Nothing explicit.

Landing herself in her late forties has changed how people look at Lucretia. A few weeks after she returns from wonderland, she walks down the street, staff in hand, and watches people's eyes skitter past her.

She buys a newspaper from a passing vendor, sits down on a bench, and reads all the articles in the piece. She's still not as in touch with this plane as she would like to be, and she needs a distraction from the recent past. She skims a couple of advertisements, chews her bottom lip. An article on elevators catches her eye.

Lucretia frowns. There aren't sophisticated elevators on this plane, and the diagram image on the page looks far ahead of its time. She reads on, pulling a pen from behind her ear and underlining – these people, they're going to be at a conference in a few days. It's not open to the public, but Lucretia thinks she's ready to perform a social experiment. She's still got some very fancy outfits hidden away in her closet.

She's aware of one thing – even if it ends up being a matter of breaking into their house (and good riddance, she doesn't exist in this universe, they can't do that much to her) She _has_ to talk to the Millers.

She decides not to get a coffee this time, and gets a little lost in her thoughts on the way home.

 

She decides on a full length, pale blue wizard robe she picked up in the last few cycles, a fine button down, white pants, and a waistcoat. She brushes her hair and applies just a little bit of makeup to accentuate her age and hide the bags under her eyes. She paints her nails white. She considers a glamour but decides against it.

Her staff is the exact same tint of off-white as her hair. She tightens her hold around it, and slides into pale blue heels.

“Davenport?”

She smiles down at Davenport. “I'll be back later, I hope,” she says. “If you need me, I have this.” She taps her necklace.

“Davenport.”

She slips out the door and locks it behind her.

It's not a long walk to Neverwinter, but it is a practiced one. The path isn't well worn but it's certainly worn, a path Lucretia made herself and has been using every few weeks for a small handful of years. Her feet hurt a little by the time she reaches town, and she has to clean off her shoes, but she's there in one piece without ruining her outfit and that's what matters. She's magic. She can wear white in the woods and not ruin the hem.

Magic isn't what she uses to get into the conference, though.

“And you are?”

Lucretia frowns at the man, standing tall. She's at least six feet tall with the heels on. “Madam Director.”

“Ma'am, you're not on here--”

She raises an eyebrow. “I ought to be.” She keeps her voice as steady and serious as she can.

The man scrambles. “I'll-- you know what, it's fine--”

She sweeps past him, heels clicking satisfyingly on the floor, and takes a discreet seat in the back corner. It takes a while for the crowd to settle- she came early for a few reasons, one of which was, of course, impulse -but finally the room is quiet, and the speakers on stage.

She produces a notebook from her pocket and begins writing notes. Mr. Miller is a renowned inventor from a family of renowned inventors, there at the conference with his daughter and grandson, Maureen and Lucas. She's less interested in Mr. Miller himself, of course. He has a lot to say but he's not her type, and she feels like he would be hard to talk to. Older men just are. She thinks after the meeting she'll have a word with Maureen.

Maureen is pretty hot.

She also scribbles down some of the theories on antigravity and sketches some of his prototypes. She recognizes these from other planes, and she jots the plane numbers in the margins – plane 19, plane 10, plane 87. She chews the inside of her mouth and switches hands discreetly to give herself a break. She fills a good quarter of her notebook with these notes.

The sun has thoroughly set by the time the conference is over. She stands at the back of the room, waiting for the crowd to dissipate and the quiet to return. She's more noticeable as an outlier than she is as a member of the group and she knows it. She chose this outfit to stand out.

She catches Maureen's eye, and Maureen gives her a calculating look. Lucretia allows the edge of her mouth to quirk up. The room empties around her, and she waits.

Maureen's eyes also flick to the glowing center of the Bulwark staff. Lucretia clutches it a little tighter, as inperceptively as possible. She can't let people fall to the thrall of her relic, and she hopes keeping it and using it has been keeping it quiet in the minds of others. For just a moment, she thinks of the Animus bell. At least it's hidden away in the middle of nowhere, and it's not going to wipe out whole towns. Bit by bit, perhaps, and maybe a towns worth of people, but the destruction of Wonderland is cloying and slow, a poison that sneaks like a plague.

Another poison like arsenic.

“Did you want to talk to me?” Maureen is in front of her now, all of a sudden. She supposes she zoned out. She schools her face and mind and pays attention to the task at hand.

“Yes. Unfortunately, what I want to talk to you about I cannot discuss here.” She smiles again. “Would you care to walk with me? There's some beautiful woods outside Neverwinter that are worth enjoying.” 

“I'm no drow, I don't know if I'd enjoy the woods in this light.”

“I have light.” Lucretia taps the staff on the rug.

Maureen nods. There's suspicion in her eyes, if not her actions, that calculating expression not having left her face. She realizes then that it's inevitable she's going to give this woman some of fischer's juice. There's no way around it. 

She leads Maureen down the steps of the building and towards the edge of town. About halfway to the forest, she gets a call on her stone, and talks in a hushed voice with someone. It sounds like Lucas, a little. She sighs when she hangs up, tucking it back in her pocket. She glances at Lucretia, too, a little worry growing between her brows.

“Is there a time you need to be back?”

“Hm, No, Lucas is old enough to take care of himself. He just wanted to know where I was.” She chuckles then. “My father, well, he's not quite as lucky, but Lucas can take care of him, too.”

Lucretia laughs as well. “Oh, and I should warn you,” she says as she steps into the forest. “I have a friend in my house who isn't entirely capable of sapient communication. He won't hurt you, but don't treat him like an animal, either.”

“Hm.”

They continue on in uncomfortable silence. Lucretia listens to the crickets. Through their cacophony, she can hear some birdsong. Her heels hurt awfully from wearing these shoes all day.

They finally, finally reach her house, and Lucretia sags before reaching to unlock the door. She hears Davenport's quick feet patter across the floor when the lock clicks, and thanks her past self for warning Maureen that he exists.

“Davenport!” Davenport says when she gets the door open.

“Hello, Davenport,” She says. “I brought a guest, I'm going to talk to her for a little while. Is that okay?”

“Davenport.”

She can't tell if he understood, but he runs off. She figures it'll be fine. She holds the door for Maureen. “Coat rack's on the left.”

She feels Maureen's curiosity, and is grateful when she doesn't ask any questions about Davenport.

Lucretia sighs in relief when she takes off her shoes. She unbuttons her robe and hangs it next to Maureen's coat. It feels good to stretch her arms, too-- that robe doesn't give her lots of flexibility around the shoulders.

“Do you have anything to drink?" Maureen pauses, considering. "I'm fully aware that you weren't invited to our event and I'm trusting you on a whim. I hope you aren't living under the suspicion that you tricked me.”

“Oh no,” Lucretia says, heading for the kitchen. “I do have wine, I'll drink first if you're worried – no, I wasn't invited, but I simply had to hear you speak. You see, I have, well, let's call it a mission.” She pulls the wine from the top shelf. “Living or dining room?”

“Living room,” Maureen says. “And fair. I couldn't let you just disappear. I'm a scientist.”

Lucretia carries two glasses out to the living room, putting the glasses down on the table before opening the bottle. It's a sealed one – do as few things to make yourself look suspicious, it's the name of the game.

“My name is Lucretia,” Lucretia says. “I'm trying to save the world. Uh, I feel like we should discuss that bit in more depth later, if you're comfortable. It may be hard to touch on the particulars right now.”

“Why's that?”

Lucretia snorts. “Well, you see, I have my secrets.” She pours herself a glass of wine and takes a sip before pouring Maureen's glass. Her own is notably fuller, but then, she's taken to finishing off the bottle when Davenport goes to bed. 

“I don't follow.”

“You have to drink some frankly unpleasant ichor to break the, well- let's call it a curse.”

“Curses are fun.” Maureen crosses her legs and sips her wine. “Why exactly did saving the world make you interested in my father's work?”

“Well you see, I am a scientist myself,” Lucretia says. “An explorer, an entrepreneur, and a writer.” She leans forward, taking a long sip from her glass. “I come from places with, ah, similar innovations. I'm curious where you got your ideas, and I feel like I could learn from them, or use them to improve my own journey. It's been a harrowing few years, and I've made no progress.”

“A scientist? Where did you study? Did you, or are you self taught?”

“I was a member of the Institute for Planar Research and Exploration,” Lucretia says.

“That sounded like static.”

“See, this is what I was saying,” Lucretia drinks another mouthful of wine. “Curse.”

“Your curse is giving me a headache.”

“In my experience, the alcohol will help. Or you know, trans-dimensional jellyfish juice.” Whoops. There it is. She can't _lie_ to this woman. 

Maureen stares at Lucretia for a few minutes in silence. “Trans-dimensional jellyfish juice?”

“I'll show you.” It's a snap decision. It was a snap decision from the start, though, and if she gets in the good books of the most renowned scientists on the plane, she can do so much with that bond. It hurts her a little to think about bonds, because Davenport is in the other room, but they're also a necessary part of life.

 

"Hold on a moment." Lucretia almost shivers when Maureen puts a hand on her arm, keeping her seated. “When you speak in static -can anyone else understand what you're saying?”

“I'm offering to let you be the first.”

“Hm. Alright, let's do this.” Maureen stands. Lucretia follows suit.

Lucretia leads Maureen to her bedroom, where the Voidfish is tucked away – it's getting too big for it's tank, even though this one fills a good portion of the room. Maureen squints at it. “Oh, yeah, and the fish is gonna need a new tank soon. You guys ought to be able to help with that, too.” She pours Maureen a vial of ichor.

“What is this stuff?” Maureen wrinkles her nose, staring at the proffered vial.

“Some kind of magic,” Lucretia shrugs.

 

Maureen raises an eyebrow. She tentatively sips at the vial of ichor, and then stands still for a moment. Lucretia watches her eyes glaze, her mouth slightly slack as she remembers, well, at least the wars. She has to have been alive for the relic wars.

“Gods,” Maureen says. “Gods. I, what?” She stares at Lucretia, who steps back against the glass, suddenly frightened. “What?? I forgot – I forgot why my _mother_ died! What the- how??” Maureen takes a deep breath. “Will I learn more if I drink more?”

“No, I don't believe that's how it works,” Lucretia says.

“Have you tested it?”

“Well,” Lucretia shrugs. “I. Well.”

Maureen downs the rest of the flask. “Oh, gods. That's vile.”

“That was my reaction the first time I tasted it.” Lucretia says. "I'm surprised you didn't notice the taste the first time."

“You didn't taste memories?”

 _That's_ a flavor Lucretia would like to learn about. She bites her lip. “Well, no, but that's a long story. I had to erase the war myself – I'm inoculated to Fischer.”

“How did you erase the war?”

“Fischer--” Lucretia gestures to the cramped jellyfish “--Is an extra-dimensional being who eats information. I feed it mostly poems. It's what I have.” She sighs. “It'd be a good idea to get someone else to help me feed it. Maybe a musician, or a carpenter? Fischer likes music.” She turns around and puts her hands on her hips. Fischer likes ducks, but she doesn't want it to feel too much of a gap where she cut Magnus out. She doesn't know if it even can remember Magnus. Some days, she wants to give Fischer a big hug. She also doesn't want to climb into the crowded tank, though. 

“So what are you trying to do?”

“Collect the seven grand relics. I'm the only one who can do it.”

“There are seven of them?”

“Yes.”

“Hm. I've only heard of four-- the gauntlet, the sash, the occulus, the more obscure philosopher's stone.”

“There are seven.” Lucretia shrugs. “Some did less damage than others. The animus bell is in a place called wonderland – Gods know what it's capable of, but the makers of Wonderland are undoubtedly worse. The temporal chalice is, well I'm not sure where it is. And then there's a seventh.” She runs a finger down the Bulwark staff but doesn't elaborate. She hopes that if Maureen notices, she doesn't think much of it. After all, Maureen was alive during the wars-- she undoubtedly heard the stories, at least, of what relic-swayed folks are like. They're not peaceful negotiators, not by far.

Maureen takes a deep breath. “We have to give this to my father. His wife died in the war. Please?”

“You understand why I can't be so quick to trust everyone with the ichor. That's the fate of the world, and anyone could abuse it. However, we can sit down, and talk about science and schematics and get a foot in the right direction. Maybe tomorrow? I'd like to meet them, if nothing else, on a more personal level. We can worry about whether or not to, uh- _inoculate_  them then.”

“Besides, you drank a lot of wine,” Maureen points out. "I'm sure this was a snap decision. I'm grateful, but it was rash of you to trust me with this."

Lucretia swallows the last of her second glass. “It takes a lot to get me drunk.” Then, after a beat of insecurity, hazards a wink.

“Is that so?” Maureen smiles. “Do you have a guest bedroom?” she adds, looking around.

“Oh, yes--” Lucretia opens the door to her bedroom and gestures to the one next to it. “This one. The other door is Davenport's room, and the bathroom is around the corner. I'm afraid it's not much.”

“I'm still a little skeptical about all this, but it seems to be checking out.” Maureen follows Lucretia back into the kitchen.

“Do you want dinner?”

“What are you serving?”

Lucretia pokes around. “Well, I have frozen chicken, more peas- we had those yesterday -spaghetti? Ramen, ah, some beef, I suppose that would be good. How about beef? Beef and, hm. Green beans? I grew them.”

“You grew beef?”

“Green beans. DAVENPORT!”

Maureen jumps a little. The gnome comes scurrying into the room.

“Davenport!”

“It's dinnertime. This is Maureen.”

He turns to Maureen. “Davenport!!”

“Hello, Davenport,” Maureen greets. She looks back at Lucretia, who's turning on the stove. “Does he only say his own name?”

“Yes.”

They eat in relative silence. The wine disappears too fast, and Lucretia pulls out an opened bottle the second time. Maureen looks a little perturbed when Lucretia pours Davenport a glass, but doesn't ask.

By the time Davenport's retired, Maureen is a little bit drunk. Lucretia is probably also drunk, but it always hits her harder later. Maureen is, well, She's looser when she's drunk. She obviously took a liking to Lucretia before, or she wouldn't have followed her home, but she's much more forward now. Lucretia isn't sure what she was expecting, to be honest.

“So where are you from?” Maureen leans forward on a hand.

“Oh, you know, another dimension,” Lucretia says.

“Fun. You've got nice wine.”

“Oh that's from your dimension.”

“You've got a nice face.”  
Lucretia laughs. “You're drunk.”

“Yeah.” She slides forward onto the table. “And we're alone and dad can't tell me what to do.”

“You're at _least_ forty. Your dad shouldn't be telling you what to do.”

“Mmmm. So are you.”

“Actually I'm--”

“No, shh, I don't wanna know.” Maureen almost knocks her wineglass over and Lucretia takes it and pours the remains into her own glass.

“I'm getting you some water.”

“Hokay.” Maureen watches Lucretia get to her feet and fill her glass with water. “How are you not drunk?”

“I do this a lot.”

“Big budget.”

“Actually, I spent 100 years with a ludicrously proficient transmutation wizard. I'm fairly good at true polymorph.”

“Handy.” Maureen drinks some of the water. “Hundred years?”

“Shit, you didn't want to know my age.”

“Now I'm curious.”

“Hundred and twenty seven years.”

“Wow.”

“I'm not quite an honorary elf.” Lucretia laughs. “Thankfully, I'm aging again now. Would suck to just live forever. Life is about moments, right?”

“I can give you _moments_.”

“If you say so.” Lucretia sips her drink.

Maureen reaches around the table and touches Lucretia's cheek. “You've got nice lips.”

“Mmm.”

Lucretia is struck with an impulse, then, and leans forward to kiss Maureen. She is awfully pretty. It's a kiss that keeps going for a while, intense and sloppy.

“We should go to bed,” Maureen says, a sentence that would sound surprisingly sober if it weren't for the context. She's draped over Lucretia, breathing heavy, her pretty blue eyes half-lidded. Lucretia wants to kiss her again. She wants to kiss her stupid. 

“Mhm.”

Maureen stands up. She shotguns the water in her glass. “Comeon. We can, I dunno, schematics in the morning.”

“Hmmm.” Lucretia follows suit. They end up in the guest bedroom.

Lucretia forgot how soft the mattress is in this room.

 

She wakes up tangled in Maureen's limbs, groggy and foggy and feeling better rested than she has in a long while. She leans into the body heat. For some reason, it doesn't bother her that her body is old now.

Probably because Maureen's is too, she realizes. They can be old together.

She relaxes in the comfort of just touching someone else for a while. It's warm, and a little sticky.

“Ngh.”

“Morning.”

“Mornrn.”  
Lucretia laughs and rolls over a little, head hitting the pillow. “Hangover?”

“Thankfully, no.”

“Hm. That's always good.” She blinks in the sunlight. “Holy fucking shit, Maureen, you have no idea how long it's been since I woke up in someone's arms. It feels amazing.”

“You can't tell my father we slept together.”

Lucretia laughs again. “Wouldn't dare.”

 

They keep visiting each other, and it's an incredible, fulfilling thing. It's the best relationship Lucretia's had since the crew-- which isn't saying too much, since it's one of the only ones she's had since then, but it still does wonders for her health. She helps the Miller family in return for planning, knowledge, and ideas. It's Maureen who suggests she make a moon base. Gods, a moon base. What an incredible idea.

Of course she will. Of course she's going to make a fucking moon base.

“I'll make myself a secret organization in the sky,” Lucretia says. They're lying out on Lucretia's roof, staring at the stars. Lucretia can identify them all from memory. Barry mapped them every cycle, this one was no exception. She redrafted all his notes.

“You still going through on your plan to collect all the relics?”

“Of course.”

“Whatcha gonna call it?”

“Hm?”

“Your secret moon society.”

“Oh I was thinking, maybe, the Bureau of Outstanding Balance? That way the acronym is Boob.”

“What about just Bureau of Balance? It's less cheesy. Uh. And less likely to raise questions?”

Lucretia blushes. “Oh, yeah, you're right.”

“Aren't I always.” Maureen's head collides with Lucretia's shoulder.

 _Yeah. She always is_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> also known as: Lucretia rolls a series of critical hits and shits in the charisma department, and lands herself a girlfriend.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> four chapters in and I STILL don't know how long this thing is gonna be. Rifp.

The buildings on the surface of the moonbase are still going up, but the grass has grown in and it's nice to lie in it. No one lives here yet, so Lucretia feels like she can wear whatever she wants, like the pair of skinny bluejeans that finally fits her, since she's been losing weight, without clinging to her like a second skin. Like the backless shirt the bought in a late cycle.

She can wear Maureen's kisses up here, too, in the wind, as they lean on each other and watch Neverwinter flash by. Fischer floats around behind them. She let it out, and it doesn't seem to want to leave her, not at all, which makes her happy. Eventually, though, they're going to have to seal up the wall to the voidfish's chambers, and it's going to be stuck below the surface. She gives it as much time out in the air as she can allow.

“So what's the staff from? It glows,”

“Oh, it's just my magic,” Lucretia says. “I made it. Naturally, I'm rather attached to it.”

“You locked the door to your bedroom,” Maureen laughs. “You protect it with your life.”

“Yeah,” Lucretia pushes forward a little so her bare feet are dangling over the city below. Maureen's hand slides up her back and over her shoulder.

“You excited to finally have this place up?”

“You've asked me that a million times.”

“Well, are you?”

“Yes.”

The wind plays in Maureen's hair, and she smiles.

 

She's not smiling a few weeks later, when she stumbles into Lucretia's room, trembling. She looks like she's been crying.

Lucretia closes her book and straightens up against the bedframe, unfolding her legs. “Maureen?”

Maureen straightens as well, a hand against the doorframe. She blinks a few times. “Sorry. Um.”

“You don't have to apologize. Did something happen?”

She takes a deep breath. “Dad died last night,” She sighs out.

“Oh,” Lucretia says, folding her hands in her lap. She has such an unusual connection with death, she realizes. It's numbing. She's watched Merle die fifty odd times. She's watched magnus's spreadeagled body get consumed in black tendrils. She's watched Lup impaled from several directions at once, her torso torn from her legs. She's watched, horrorstruck, as the people who were swayed to the bulwark staff tore each other's heads off. She pressed a button in Wonderland, too. She wonders if Cam is alive. Probably not.

There's a hand on her face. “Lucretia?”

“I'm sorry, I got lost in thought, is.” She swallows. “Is there anything you need?”

“Can I sleep here?”

“Of course.”

Maureen climbs onto the bed and curls up with her head in Lucretia's lap.

“What were you thinking about?”

“Oh, death.”

Maureen looks up at Lucretia. “Have you dealt with death a lot?”

Lucretia chuckles. “A lot is, unfortunately,” She sighs. “An understatement.”

Maureen laughs. “Does it get easier?”

She blinks. Easier? No, not really. It gets harder, and yet, during the century it was so easy. She tangles her fingers in Maureen's hair. “I guess that- depends.”

 

Lucretia doesn't get mail on the Moonbase, much, but she does have to go down planetside to hire folks and to buy wine, and occasionally she picks up a newspaper. There was an article in today's paper about a place called Glamour springs. Forty people dead: unknown causes. Travelling chef ran from scene of crime.

She thinks of Taako for a moment, but shakes it off-- Taako isn't hit and run. She knows Taako well.

For a moment she thinks of Magnus, touching her bracer to summon a transport. Magnus, thankfully, was not in Raven's Roost when it was collapsed. She finds herself extremely lucky on that point. She can't stand the idea of watching more of her friends die.

She climbs out of the transport with the newspaper still crumpled in her right hand. Maureen is waiting for her.

“Did you get the wine-- Oh, what happened?” Maureen pushes off the wall.

“Oh, nothing,” Lucretia says. “Just reminiscing. Dead friends, you know?” She offers a tired smile.

“Dead friends indeed,” Maureen says. “Want to see what I'm working on?”

“Oh yes,” Lucretia says. “But let me put away the wine first.”

“I can help.”

They put away the wine, and then head out in another pod towards the laboratory. Lucas grumbles when he sees Lucretia climb out of the pod. Maureen gives him a look and he stops staring. She wonders momentarily what kind of communication the two had in that moment, and brushes it off. She wants to see Maureen's new robots.

Maureen does not, in fact, show her robots. She shows her some schematics, instead, pulling them from a shelf and unravelling them with a flourish. “See, I've been thinking.”

Lucretia leans forward, studying the design on the blue paper.

“I've discovered that souls are somewhat malleable. With lucas's help of course, he's such a sweetie. We've been thinking of transplanting souls into robotic bodies. It's no solid plan, we're not sure if it would work and we are sure it would kill the original body the soul possessed, at least as we have it now. But think about that! We could reach immortality.”

“I'm not sure immortality is something you should want to have,” Lucretia says. The schematics they have set here are somewhat rudimentary, but she thinks it could work. She did sneak into Barry's laboratory after she took their memories and go digging through his notes on the robots of the Capital City.

“Oh-- you've been alive for a while, haven't you?” Maureen says. “You never did explain to me how that happened.”

“It's a long and unreplicatable story. You would have to manufacture something vastly different from this specific technology, and you would have to, well, destroy the planar system. It's not a good idea. I don't like immortality, because it's not what I was made for, personally. I don't want it and I'll never seek it. I plan on dying, thank you _very_ much.”

Maureen hums. “Well, nothing said you have to use this.”

“That's true.” Lucretia chews her lip. Should she point out the flaws in the design or not? She decides not to. “It's pretty neat, Maureen.”

“You're thinking about something.” Maureen wrinkles her nose. “I can see it in your face.”

Lucretia chuckles. “Aren't I always.”

 

“Are you going to be on Craig's List, sir?”

“Hm?” Taako looked up from his copy of the neverwinter times.

“You're standing in front of it. Are you trying to decide?”

“What's craig's list?” Taako turns around. Sure enough, a list of names is pinned to the tree behind him. “It's right behind your fuckin park bench, how could I have known?”

“You're not from Neverwinter, are you?”

“Noooo?”

“Merc work,” the woman says, in low volume. “It's the best cash these days. Shame, too. The economy's been in the shitter for like ten years.”

“Hm.” Taako chews his lip. He supposes he does look like he needs money. Even though his clothes were once fancy, they're starting to fall apart, and they hang off his body like a cloth sack might. “Yeah, maybe.”

“No kidding, man, where are you from that the economy isn't trash? Dressed like that?”

“It's Lupa, and uh, I mean't maybe I'll put my name on the fucking list. I wasn't really thinking about money.”

The woman looks suspicious and Taako sighs. He stands up, writes _Lupa the Wizard_ on the goddamn tree, and heads in the other direction. If someone cares enough, they can find him.

As it turns out, someone does care enough. That someone is a war-weary dwarf by the name of Highchurch. He's nonplussed when the man sits down next to him at the bar.

He orders a water.

At a bar.

Taako side-eyes him, and sips his martini.

A few minutes pass before the dwarf speaks up. “Are you Lupa the wizard?”

Taako coughs. “That's me.”

“You were on craig's list.”

Taako grips his glass a little tighter. He'd almost forgotten about craig's list. “Yep.”

“Want a gig?”

Taako considers this. He'd mostly been bullshitting when he first put his name on the goddamn list, trying to get someone to stop looking at him like – like that. Like he can't remember how but exactly like he never wants to be looked at. Some form of pity. Then again, though, he's already a criminal. What harm can becoming a mercenary do, really? He can even go back to using his own name. That'll be a relief. His fake one was starting to make his chest hurt for some reason.

He sips his martini, perhaps a little more than sips-- whatever. “Sure.”

“Great.” The dwarf rubs his hands together. “I'm Merle Highchurch. Do you have time this evening?”

“For what?” Taako recrosses his legs and leans against the bar.

“Just figuring out logistics. We'll hit the road tomorrow morning. I got a place for ya to stay.”

“Neat. Sure.” He finishes his martini. “Lead the way, Highchurch.”

They walk down the street for a while before Taako speaks again.

“It's Taako, by the way.”

“Hm?”

“Lupa isn't a real name. Call me Taako.”

“Well, alright. We're not looking for honest men in this business anyway.”

Later, Taako learns that's because of Merle's talent with Zone of Truth.

 

"I wonder how many apples I'd have to eat to get arsenic poisoning?"

They're sitting on the green again, sharing a pipe. Lucretia doesn't smoke often, mostly because it has a tendency to make her anxious, but Maureen had offered and, well, this is Maureen. She can't get anxious when Mo's around, right? So she said yes.

The fresh air is sweet and tangy and reminds her of her homeworld.

“I dunno. A lot.”

Maureen re-packs the bong and casts a quick _produce flame_. Neither of them are particularly good at evocation, so they're sure to have burns by the morning.

"Mm did you know arsenic smells like garlic?"

"What? No way." Lucretia takes a hit. "Me too."

Maureen laughs. "You smell like weed."

"I'm, I _am_ a weed, Mo," Lucretia mumbles. "Don't belong."

"You're not a weed. You're really important to the ecosystem."

"Mm."

"And you taste good. Like a sugar maple."

“Hhhyou know what else tastes good?” Lucretia giggles into the night sky.

Maureen takes a long hit from the bong. “What's that?”

“ _Belladonna_ ,” Lucretia says, like she's telling a secret.

“Like, the poison? You know what that tastes like?”

“Mmmhmm.”

“What does it taste like, then?”

“Wine.”

“Huh.”

“Every time I dink wine now, I think of belladonna.”

“Why do you know what that tastes like?”

“Cause I ate it once, silly!”

“Yea but like -” Maureen waves her hand in the air. “-Why did you taste it?”

“Cause I was being tortured!” Lucretia shrugs, taking the bong. “Iunno.”

“Wow. You've been tortured?”

“Yea. I was kidnapped and locked in a dungeon and everything.” Lucretia sighs out a mouthful of steam and stares out beyond the edge of the moonbase. “Gods, I'm so scared.”

“Why are you scared?”

“Hmm I don't know. Probably the weed?”

“Myeah.” Maureen grabs Lucretia around the shoulders and yanks her backwards so she's lying on the ground. “I don't have legs.”

“Happens.” Lucretia frowns. “I don't like stars. But I don't want them to go away. Because that's worse.”

“The stars aren't gonna go away, Luc,” Maureen says.

“Yea they will. They always do.”


	5. Chapter 5

Johann calls Lucretia downstairs, to the voidfish chambers. “the voidfish laid an egg,” he says, before yanking her from her office. It doesn't quite parse. It doesn't, in fact, process in her brain till both her hands are on the glass of Fischer's tank, staring at the iridescent oval. Fischer croons at her, their soft tune ringing in her brain.

It's beautiful. The voidfish, both of them, are beautiful and unearthly and terrifying. The first thing she thinks, of course, is _what am I supposed to do with this situation?_ Because she had never planned for this, for a child. Fischer huddles close to the egg.

Lucretia sits herself against the tank, staff hugged close to her side, and considers her options in this scenario. She can't get rid of a baby voidfish. She remembers catching fischer, all those many, many years ago. Could a baby voidfish do what fischer had done for her? Could, if separated, a baby voidfish create yet another opportunity for memory erasure? She dances on these questions like the faint bluish light shining out of Fischer's tank dances on the walls. During her rumination, Johann came and went-- he never asks her to leave, of course, and merely does his job. His music washes over Lucretia in that soothing way music ought to.

The Bureau had been failing so terribly at its job, the past year it's been open. Not a single relic has been retrieved, staff aside. It occurs to her, then, that she could only reclaim the staff because it was her own creation. That could prove problematic. Davenport is not sapient enough to fetch the occulus, she's sure. She licks her lips, watching the light reflecting through the murky water.

The egg hatches that evening. The voidfish makes noises of such joy that Lucretia's heart is overhwelmed. She cannot take the baby away yet. She presses her fingers to the tank, watching them dance and spin. She wonders what it's like to have a family.

With a sick feeling, Lucretia realizes she's going to rip family from yet another being. She does it anyway, retreating to the Starblaster to retrieve a small tank, one Barry had built for Fischer when they were just a baby. There are cracks in it from cycle sixty-five. Her hands shake tracing the caulk in the holes, the memory of fixing those strong in her mind.

The most terrifying part, she realizes, is descending into the tank, taking Junior (after all, that is what magnus would call it) away. The most terrifying part is that Fischer doesn't stop her. Fischer keens and cries and watches, the great mass of tentacles and galaxies, Fischer, who could consume her and destroy her without thought. The sound reminds her of entering that fateful cycle, the homeworld Fischer came from. She trembles, dragging herself from the tank, dripping with fear and ichor, gasping for breath. She seals the baby away in the tank and hurries from the room, sobbing. A trail of black water marks her passage away.

Of course, it was gut-wrenchingly terrifying and heart-wrenchingly saddening to tear the baby away from Fischer. She hurries. She confines herself to her chambers, the baby resituated on her desk, then moved to the floor. The light dances around the room, just the way Fischer's does in the basement, except that this light is unhindered by dark ichor.

She trembles on her bed, fear welling in her. Fischer could hurt her, if it wanted. It could chase her. She's reminded of the year she spent alone, persued across continents by towering figures. She dreams fitfully, waking to gasp. For many days she forgets herself.

Then, she drags herself to the shower, cleans the floors, and sets about her daily life with still trembling hands.

Maureen approaches her later, in her office. "Finally, it's set to here," she notes as she observes the message board on the door. Lucretia puts down her pen. She feels like she has aged another decade since she last talked with her girlfriend. 

"Hello, Maureen," Lucretia sighs.

"Where have you been? I tried to call you like five times this week. Johann says you've been busy, and no one else seems to know where you went."

"I'm working on some classified, hm. Bureau work. It's a little strenuous."

Maureen walks around her desk and rubs her fingers into Lucretia's aching neck. "Well, I'm always here if you need a break. I always will be."

"Of course."

 

 

Lucretia gets a call on her stone of farspeech. She's working through a frustrating decision – Junior is bobbing in their tank behind her. She's been trying to decide whether it's a reasonable idea to hire back Taako, Magnus, Merle and Barry for a few weeks now, ever since they were born. Her reclaimers are still dying but she's not sure if she's ready to risk them figuring out who she is.

She picks up the call with a sigh, hoping it's Maureen and not Lucas, who also has the frequency of her desk stone – stupid decision, she's glad he doesn't have her necklace frequency, she'd be getting calls every other day. The exact person behind the call is indeterminable at first because all she hears is a sniffle. That's not good, especially if it's Maureen.

“Yes?”

“Lucretia?” It's Lucas – His voice is shaking.

“Lucas. What do you want.” She picks up some more paperwork, neatening the edges and putting the stone down on the table.

“Lucretia, this is serious.” He sounds sullen.

“Mhm.”

“Maureen's dead,” His voice cracks.

Lucretia puts her papers down and stares at the stone. She blinks. “I'm sorry?”

“Mom's dead,” Lucas repeats.

Lucretia takes a deep breath. Okay, Maureen's dead? “How --”

“Experiment went wrong.” He's back to mumbling.

“Okay,” Lucretia says. People die. Maureen was mortal, just like her. People die sometimes. “I'm going to work on paperwork now.” She's very deliberate. “I'll talk to you later.”

She hears a fragment of “What?” as she turns off the stone. She's seen too much death in her lifetime to have the energy to deal with more. She's oh, so incredibly glad she's so much older than Magnus now, because it means she'll die first. She'll go out, and she won't have to watch everyone else fall like flies. It's selfish, she knows it is. She's always been selfish.

Lucretia clutches a piece of paper a bit too tight and it crumples. There's something about being selfish that's kept her safe for the past ten years. The past hundred and twenty five years. She remembers the little cafe she used to visit as a child. She remembers taking a piece of bread from the shopkeeper and eating it slowly, not really paying any attention to the taste.

It didn't matter, back then, because she wouldn't get food at home most days. Someone else could have eaten those samples, though.

She was selfish when she ran away.

 _Maybe it's being alone that made me selfish_ , she thinks. She's been alone forever. The century feels like a reprise.

 

The first day into the numbness that comes with death is too quiet. Maureen's not there for her to lean against, not there for visiting. Maureen isn't coming up the stairs and begging her for her time or asking for shit or anything. Lucretia dangles her legs over Neverwinter and thinks about how she did that with Maureen just a few days ago. She stares at the stars, late one evening, and thinks about nothing at all.

 

“Get back--”

“I can help --”

“No shit, you're injured, get fucking _back_ \--”

“Shut up!” Lucretia yells. “Shut up, get behind me, I have an idea.” Panic is moving through her like ants in her arteries and the enemy is getting too close, an arrow whizzes past her too close. Her heart beats staccato in her fingers. She steps forward, gripping her staff with both hands, and casts a new hybrid spell she designed that cycle, one with frightening potency.

It looks like prismatic wall, but the energy radiating off it is strictly necrotic, and it plows forward through the encroaching crowd without mercy, leaving Lucretia trembling. She takes a step back, bumping into Barry, who's still clutching is broken arm to his chest.

“Lucretia, you--” a shuddering pause. “You- Lup--”

Lucretia looks towards where she thought Maureen was standing, and finds that she's not there. She's a few feet forward, her body rotting against the wall, clearly dead from the force of her spell. Her lips are falling off her jaw, her eyes rolled backwards in her head. Bones jut out of her hands. Lucretia shudders.

Taako whoops behind her, then walks a few feet forward and freezes.

“Lucretia.”

“I--”

Taako shoves her against the wall, her head banging painfully into the stone, and she cries out. The snarl on his face is intensified by the heavily bleeding gash on his forehead, dripping over his eyebrow and onto his cheek.

“Did you fucking--”

“I-I-I'm sorry, I'm so sorry---”

“At least all the others are dead,” Barry says, his voice hollow. Lucretia chokes on a sob, and it gets stuck going down because Taako's hands are pressing on her neck.

She jerks, and Taako's face turns into Barry's, sitting on her chest. She's lying on her bed in her room on the Moonbase and Barry is on top of her, his face streaked with tears. His hands are pressed against her throat. She can't breathe, gasping over and over and shuddering. The weight on her chest is crushing her lungs, Barry's hands pressing to hard on her windpipe.

Lucretia hiccups, but her body is weighted down. Her limbs are full of lead and static and insects, crawling just under her skin and making the world buzz.

“You've got a habit of killing off people's girlfriends, don't you?” Barry hisses, leaning in close. She can't feel his breath. “Lup's dead. Maureen's dead. It's you, it's because of you, it's your fault--”

The buzzing intensifies, blotting out her hearing, and she stutters and gasps again. The air doesn't reach her lungs. Black spots turn up on her vision, and she hiccups. She deserves this. It's her fault her friends are hurting and it's her fault Maureen's dead and Lup's dead and everybody's dead-- everybody's dead – she struggles.

All of a sudden, the pressure on her body eases, and Lucretia gulps down huge lungfuls of air, tears running down her face. She jolts into a sitting position as soon as she has the energy, sending the world spinning around her. She wraps her fingers around her staff, which is lying next to her, and some of the tension eases.

She needs to keep that from happening for real. She pulls on a nightgown and rushes to the front room of her private chambers, and begins casting a spell.

She can justify an anti-lich spell to anyone who asks her. It's not strange, to protect from the undead, or from necromancers. It takes her a few days, and so much energy, but locked away and full of determination she makes the strongest shield she's ever made.

Lucretia curls up in the corner and lets her heavy eyelids droop. Exhaustion sweeps her away. As she begins to drift, she hears that little voice in her mind again.

_Yes, yes, good, we're safe. We're safe. We can be safe together, you and me._

She hugs her staff a little closer.

She hallucinates sometimes.

It's fine.

 

The next day, Lucretia makes a decision. She gathers up her notes and sits down, blinking sleep from her eyes. She rewrites all ninety-eight cycles the crew lived through. She rewrites pasts and presents and edits the relics out neatly. She edits out names and dates and that one childhood memory of making sour cream that she accidentally took from Taako. She works her metaphorical scissors carefully around the joints and words and thoughts of her friends to keep the century they spent free neatly hidden, and still reveal the relic war, the relics themselves, and a few other things that she feels bad for taking.

She'd already tested the potency of Junior by erasing their existence from the minds of the world, so she's not afraid that this won't work. It will work, just like erasing the entirety of a century worked.

Feeding the journals to junior takes several days. The little voidfish isn't quite as hungry as its parent, and just one journal sates it for a long time. Taking two-day breaks between journals is infuriating, but she has a new hire to distract her, so it's fine – a drow elf named Brian. He reminds her of Taako a bit, and it helps with the lonely feeling.

Finally, she has them all together. Brian defects, unexpectedly, but pieces fall into place. She schemes.

 

Sometimes, she hallucinates. Sometimes, it's not fine. She wakes up with the Hunger through her, surrounding her, holding her down, and she chokes and chokes and chokes till either black encompasses her and she gives up or she lands on the floor with a hard thump and the illusion is shattered, fears chased away by reality.

Waking up becomes too much work.

Lucretia curls on her bed, a hand clasped tight around the Bulwark staff, and tries to keep herself occupied. She wishes she could converse with someone. It's easiest to stay awake in social situations, when she can keep herself high-strung. Here and now, though, she can't do that. She can't trust anyone with the knowledge that might spill out of her mouth if she's sleepy.

The staff starts singing a little song Taako had sung on the starblaster one evening, when she couldn't sleep. It's lilting elvish. She follows the words for a while, then begins to sing along as it repeats. It makes her feel safe.

She pets the staff with one hand, letting the gentle promise of safety wash over her in waves. Safe, safe, she's safe.

She falls asleep a few hours later, feeling safe, and she dreams of her head in Lup's lap, her feet in Taako's, long fingers caressing through her hair. Taako is saying something, but she can't make out the words. The tonality of his voice lulls her in comfort.

Safe. Safe. Safe.

She wakes up the next morning, resolute – she'll do what she has to. That spell, it's what she needs. It's what the world needs, and it's what she'll give the world.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short chapter today!

The moonbase is, well, uncomfortable.

Taako's not entirely sure why the entire place gives him shivers. It feels like somewhere he's been before, but utterly, entirely wrong. The buildings arch in dome shapes above his head. He stands at the edge of the world and looks down, thinking about how he could tip forward and he would just fall to the ground, hundreds of meters below.

He starts when Magnus taps his shoulder, and almost does fall off the edge.

“Woah! You coming, Taako?”

“Hm?”

“They got us a dorm. We have some roommate or something, but it's mostly fine.”

“Oh, yeah homie, I gotcha.” Taako straightens his hat.

He follows Magnus into the dormitories – another eerie, dome shaped building. They head down some stairs, into a small room with two bunk beds shoved to the sides of it. Taako runs his fingers along the brickwork the whole way down, letting the sensation turn them numb. He grimaces when he looks at them, because they've got gunk all over them. He wipes them off on his pants and turns his attention back to the dorm room.

“I call top bunk,” he exclaims, throwing himself at the empty bunk bed. Merle seems to have already claimed the right bottom bed.

Magnus just shrugs as Taako clambers up to the top. There's a little table attached to the wall, right at bed-height. He puts his bag there, flopping back against the mattress. The sheets are plain tan with a lowish thread count, but Taako keeps a sleepy sack in his bag for places like this.

He smiles at the ceiling for a little bit, then starts unpacking. He strips his shoes off and drops them on the floor, causing some exclamation from Magnus below him. He takes the compression spell off the sleepy sack and shoves it against the wall. He takes his robe off and hangs it over the bedpost, then puts his hat on it too.

He jumps off the bunk and lands right next to Magnus, making him flinch. He sits on Magnus's bed. “I hope they have tea,” he says.

“I could go for a nice oolong.” Magnus has finally removed most of the armor he wears around everywhere. Taako feels smug to be a wizard, sometimes, because he doesn't have _any_ of that. None. Pure, complete, unadulterated Taako style shows through in every outfit.

Then again, Magnus is the sort of person who might like the way armor looks. Taako almost laughs at the thought.

“I think this'll be okay,” Magnus says, out of the blue. He stretches and his tunic rides up under his belt, bunching when he lowers his arms again. He tugs the hem down.

“This as in what?” Taako says.

“This gig! It seems pretty good. Yeah, there's all the strange last gig shit and yeah lots of people who work here have died but we're special, right? We brought the gauntlet in. The Director was really happy with us.”

Merle snorts and snaps something he's folding.

Magnus whips around. “Am I wrong? She seemed really happy to see us!”

Magnus is right about that. The Director seemed unusually excited to see them. Her expression and her mannerisms were all surface-level impassive, but somehow, Taako could tell she was happy. She looked like she was seeing family for the first time in a decade. Of course, he's never met her before. He doesn't even know why he noticed that. It's probably not even a real thing, he was probably projecting – maybe Sazed's mannerisms onto her? He's not really the sort who knows _emotions_ , or has friends.

“That doesn't mean we won't die, homie.” Taako flops back on his bed. “And we don't even have our own little suite. That would be nice. We could have a – a kitchen maybe, and a living room, and our own private bedrooms with bathrooms attached….”

“You're spoiled,” Merle says.

“Naw. I'm elvish.”

“Were we gonna get tea?” Magnus rocks on his heels.

“Oh yeah, we were.” Taako slides back into his boots. “Let's goooooo.”

Merle pulls some shoes on and hops down from his bunk.

It feels a little better, wandering around campus with the other boys. It's less gut wrenching to look at the infrastructure or feel the wind in his hair. Like they ought to be there, maybe. He twirls his umbrella on his arm as they enter the cafeteria, which is mostly empty at this time of day. Killian's eating a late lunch. She looks exhausted.

“Hey, Killian!” Magnus says, immediately rushing over to her. She takes a pointed bite out of her sandwich and watches him with tired eyes. They have some sort of quieter conversation over at her table while Taako and Merle head towards the kitchens.

Taako, oh so kindly, fetches Magnus's tea for him.

 

Taako's nervous when he gets a call to the Director's office. Of course he is. She's his new boss, and he feels like he must be in trouble-- no, he hasn't done anything, well, he might have stolen a few things but it was nothing important –

He swallows and enters the room. She's scribbling away in some journal with a passive expression on her face. Well. As good a start as any, he guesses.

“Ya called?”

The Director looks up. “Ah, yes. Taako. I wanted to talk to you about your record.”

Taako blanches, a staccato beat striking up in his throat. His record? Does she know he's the chef from Glamour Springs? He never should have started using his real name again. He swallows again. “My record?”

“Yes-- It's a little lacking, it says here you had a cooking show?” She flips some pages on her desk. “Obviously I don't have anything on your childhood, but I also have none of your credentials, your date of birth, or the past six years? Did you just stop cooking?”

“Yea, that's about it,” Taako says.

“Did something happen?”

“Nothing happened.” Taako crosses his arms.

“Is there anything you'd like me to erase?”

Taako studies the Director's face. Does she know? She doesn't seem insincere, it's almost like she's known him, but- no one knows him that well. Taako's been alone his whole life, there's no chance this woman knows how to treat him. He pushes that thought out of his mind, because it's starting to make his head hurt.

Does he want to erase Glamour Springs? Yes. Does he want to talk with someone enough for it to actually happen? Not really. He doesn't want to consider Glamour Springs hard enough to hand over the necessary details. He huffs.

“Nah, I'm good.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> comments and kudos feed the writing monster in my soul...


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lots of eating disorder-y stuff in this chapter. Just so ur forewarned.   
> I think I've reached the point with this story that I can update it every other day til it's all finished. :D

“You gonna eat that?”

“Hm?” Taako picks over his broccoli again. He doesn't want to eat today. Happens sometimes. The cafeteria smells like the garlic grits special today and the other option was chicken.

Okay, maybe today is an especially bad one. He swallows and turns the broccoli floret over with his fork.

“I said, are you gonna eat that?” Magnus's mouth is still full. He smells overwhelmingly like garlic. Taako runs his tongue around the inside of his mouth and tries to ignore the smell.

“Nah.”

“The chicken is really good,” Merle says, and there's something in his tone that makes Taako wince. Whoever last said that in Taako's earshot is dead now. Dead as a fucking doornail.

“Well, I don't want it.”

“You should eat _something_ , Taako. I know you have your days, but...” Magnus shrugs. “It's not good for you?”

He's not sure why he cares. Merle and Magnus are just a couple of chucklefucks he met on the road, some hooligans he picked up to help with the fighting. Alright, Merle was more like his boss for a while, sure, but they became this ragtag team. There's nothing about their relationship which is based on anything truly solid or important, so why does he care so much about whether they live or die?

Taako stares at his broccoli without really seeing it. His hands shake a little.

_“_ _Are you Taako? Can I have your signature?”_

_“Angelique! Be polite! Oh- Thank you, sir!”_

_Take a sample. Take a sample._ He can't look at Magnus and Merle. He can hear them chewing. The world smells like garlic and chicken and sounds like the wet suction of food, and mouths, and teeth.

He bears the overwhelming atmosphere for a little longer, his vision narrowed to the green of his vegetables, before he decides he's had enough.

“I'll, uh, see you guys later,” Taako says, pushing to his feet. He clutches the umbra staff tight to keep his hand from shaking, the other pressed firmly against the table. He leaves his tray where it is and hurries towards the door.

“Asshole! Clean up your tray!” he hears Magnus shout, but he doesn't care. He's already an asshole, and he wants to breathe. To stop suffocating. The smell of garlic carries on the air. It's stuck in his lungs.

He leans against the fantasy costco for a moment, breathing as hard as he can, trying not to smell. He's sure he's not far enough from the cafeteria for the garlic smell to have gone away. Besides, what if he smells like garlic? He smelled like garlic when-- when-- but he'd been cooking with it, that's different, right? It's probably stuck in his skin again – he remembers scrubbing his fingers for days, trying to get the smell of garlic out from under his fingernails. He shudders.

He stands for a few minutes, letting the strong winds that constantly blow over the moon base pull at his clothes and hair. Then he turns, hurries across campus, and heads to the dorms. He locks the door to his bedroom and collapses across the bed, glad that he can even do so- when they had a shared room, there was no sense of privacy. He still hasn't entirely made this place his _own_.

The pillow doesn't smell like garlic, though. He can force his face into the fabric and breathe through it, letting mint and lavender chase the cloying aftertaste of fear from his throat. He hiccups, but blinks tears back before they can fall. He doesn't need that shit.

Eventually he falls asleep, and dreams of grinning corpses and bloody mouths.

 

Her name is Lucretia. He considers this, and for a moment, he's reminded of Glamour Springs. Why does he always think of Glamour Springs? She's not even tangentially related to that place, right? She seems uncomfortable, and he can't blame her-- he knows how he would feel if, only a few years ago, someone had yelled his real name in a public place without his consent. Why her name reminds him of Glamour Springs, though, he doesn't know.

He doesn't care to know.

In fact, he hates the connection. He hates that for some reason the concept of Belladonna and Lucretia go hand in hand. Something feels wrong about this.

It's just coincidence, though, that leads Taako to the campus bar at the same time that the director is there, sipping what looks to be at least her second glass of wine. He doesn't even want to consider what her constitution might be, not if she can down poison like a fucking lunatic.

He buys something that he recalls being both fancy and strong – after all, taste doesn't matter when you have a mysterious yogurt mouth curse – and slides into a barstool next to her.

“Heyo, Director.”

Lucretia starts and looks up at you. She blinks a couple of times, chewing her lip. “Hello, Taako. How are you?”

“Fine, fine. You?” He sips his highly alcoholic go-gurt beverage.

“Oh, you know. Busy.”

“'Cha thinking about?”

There's a long pause in which time Lucretia drinks half her glass of wine. Taako notes that it's a rather large glass. “Thinking about the war.”

Lucretia lies a lot, he knows this, but this time she's even less tricky with hiding it. He sips his drink again to hide a frown.

“Yanno, Lucy--” Lucretia grimaces, and opens her mouth, but he corrects himself “-- _madam director,_ I know I got a talent for forgetting shit, but like, I don't remember shitfuck about the war. Hell, you mentioned that candy town and I remembered being sad about it. I get the feeling I was in some kinda resistance before the war even ended. But! I don't remember shit. I don't remember a thing!”

“I wouldn't know,” Lucretia says. Another lie, this one better veiled.

“So you do know!” He knocks back the rest of his drink. “Lucy, ya gotta tell me shit.”

“Please stop calling me Lucy.” she manages a miffed look through the haze of alcohol. Maybe she isn't even drunk. She's finished the glass of wine she had and the bartender's poured her another glass without even a moment's hesitation. Does she come here often? Is she an alcoholic? Taako's not drunk enough for this. He plops a few gold pieces down on the table along with his glass, and when the bartender stops back over he asks for the same as last time.

“Why should I stop calling you Lucy? It's not Lucretia.”

“Old friends used to call me that. Before the... war.” Well, okay, she's not lying.

“Is there another nickname I could use?”

“Not.. not really.” She swallows wine again. She drinks that shit like water.

“Wait, so – all the nicknames of your name are things your old dead friends called you? That sucks. Lemme see if I can make a new one.”

“Taako, I don't think that will work --”

“Lucy's out, clearly, what about Luce?”

“No.” Her frown deepens.

“Creesh?”

“No”

“Creesha?”

“No.”

“Keesh?”

“...no.”

“Lu?”

“Fuck no.”

“Lucy-lu?”

“Nope.

“Lulu?”

“No, please stop. Taako, please.” She rubs one temple with her finger and then lifts her glass to her lips, tips back the whole thing and slams it down. Her hands are trembling. The bartender refills it without question. Her expression is a grimace, and for some reason, Taako recognizes panic in her face. Taako knows this lady's got something else going on. He's just not sure what, yet.

Lulu does strike a chord with him, though. He might use it anyway. Just to tease her. It's a nice nickname. He also has the vaguest feeling there's something more to this name than he can catch on, but it makes his head hurt to think about it, so he doesn't.

 

Everyone knows that the director doesn't eat much. Folks toss around theories-- Killian and Carey think it's stress. Avi thinks she's still mourning for her girlfriend. Long and short, though, it's widely known that Lucretia doesn't eat much. Lucretia knows it's widely known that she doesn't eat much.

She doesn't have a ton of good excuses for this. This is just is how it is.

On her way out of her office one evening she nearly trips over a pitcher of water on the floor. She catches it before it can spill with a rapidly-cast mage hand, and then stares at it. A pitcher. A cup. A bowl of raspberries. On a tray.

She stands there, staring, for a very long time. She's sure of some things. The floor under her feet is not dirt, and the walls at her sides are smooth. The fruit in the bowl is not Belladonna. She puts a hand to the wall, anyway, a little unsteady all of a sudden. It's such a conventional way of giving food to people, a tray. Such a normal way of providing water – in a pitcher. She can handle them separately. It's fine. But the last time she saw a pitcher on a tray – moonlight streams in through a window, somewhere in her mind, and she remembers eating leaves, thinking they were the most amazing snack in the world.

She bends down and picks up the little note sitting on the tray.

_Hey Lucretia! Hope you're having a good evening. Make sure to stay hydrated!_

_-Magnus_

Well then. It's a nice thought. She takes the tray into the bathroom of her suite and pours it out in the sink, deposits the tray behind her bureau and puts the raspberries on her desk. Then she drops into her chair, folds her hands, and breathes very slowly.

She has rice for dinner.

The raspberries stay on her desk, untouched, until they mold. Davenport removes them.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter includes the FIRST EVER SCENE i wrote for Buttercups & Belladonna. Finally. Fiiiiiiiiinnally.   
> We're getting awfully close to some form of climax, too.

“Hey Lulu?”

Lucretia has to bite her lip to keep from screaming. “Please, for the love of all that exists on this plane, do not call me Lulu.” There are some moments when she wishes she had erased Lup's childhood name, and this is one of them.

“Okay, okay.” Taako crosses his arms and his legs in her doorway, leaning against the frame. “I thought you might want a break.”

She flips a paper violently. “What made you think that?”

“Your hands are shaking. Thought you might like some eggs? It's three in the morning and when it's three in the morning I always make eggs. Hm?”

“What made you think to come to my office at all?” Lucretia asks, trying to still her shaking hands.

“Your sign said you were in, I dunno.”

“Hm.”

“You coming?”

Lucretia sighs. “Alright, sure.”

“Huh.”

She pushes herself to her feet and follows him out of her office, setting the sign to _not here_.

The boys' suite is quiet at this time of night, and it feels almost like she's back on the ship, writing while Taako and Lup sing old elvish duets from the kitchen.

There are no duets, of course. Just Taako, and the soft sound of his humming. She wonders if he can remember the words to those songs, especially the ones including the lavender sky.

Sometimes, she misses the lavender sky. Often.

Lucretia isn't in the mood to write, either. Instead, she's drawing some flowers, little buttercups and tulips, in the notebook she brought down with her.Buttercups are good luck, right? They'd given her good fortune in the past.

Gods, what she would do for a single buttercup right now. Just a little bit of superstition, to take the weight off her shoulders.

“Can I trust you, madame Lucretor?”

Lucretia laughs. “That's Magnus's line.”

“You know what, you're right. That's Maggie's line.” He flips his eggs. Over medium. She winces as he uses the low-sodium salt shaker on them. He's really lost so much trust since the mission. She didn't know it was possible.

He sits down across from her at the table. “Thinking hard, huh? What'cha thinking about?”

Lucretia hums. She has that one journal open, the one she wrote little bits of fantasy and bullshit in back during the century. She's not sure what drove her to bring it – it has plenty of unfilled pages, but it fell open to the drawing of a buttercup she'd made before being kidnapped and poisoned in year twenty-five. “Dried buttercups have little to no toxicity, but when they're alive, when they're fresh, they're poisonous to cattle, horses, and other livestock, probably because they ingest large quantities as they graze. When I was a child, someone told me they were toxic to humans, too. It might have been my mother. A friend said they were good luck. I'm not sure how something toxic can have good luck, but I'd like to believe.”

“Huh.” Taako's mouth is full of egg.

She decides to continue voicing her thoughts aloud, flipping the page. “A fatal dose of belladonna is ten berries, but some folks have survived eating much more than that, especially if they're healthy. It's hallucinogenic. It's sometimes used in witchcraft to induce a fugue state. I've also seen it used for torture. Luckily, Buttercups are in fact an emetic, so having them on hand in those situations isn't a bad thing.”

Taako's face goes white, and he stops eating. “Are you going to torture me?”

Oh shit. Shit, fuck fuck fuck. Why was she talking about this anyway? Taako doesn't handle trauma the way she does. Taako doesn't even remember that this is _traumatic_ for her, now. 

“What? No, of course not, you--” She takes a breath. “Taako, I'm just reviewing old notes. I'm a busy woman and I have a world to save, sometimes I…” She sighs.

“Right,” Taako rasps. He puts his plate in the sink and retreats to his bedroom. There's something else on his mind, clearly. She follows him only to his doorframe, lingering outside.

“You alright, Taako?” She asks, her hand poised to knock on the door.

“Ngmph,” she hears. She relaxes a little bit. He's not crying, at least.

“I'll be in my office,” she decides, going back to the kitchen and packing away her things. Maybe she'd triggered some static, talking about that one. She's fairly sure Taako would be ashamed of his memory problems. (He calls himself stupid so _often_ these days.) It makes her chest hurt, considering that.

She spreads her notes out on her desk in her office, and begins a list of poisons.

Buttercups. Belladonna. Relic thrall, of course. Arsenic, like in apples. She pauses, pen hovering, then puts it down.

She can add to this later.

 

_Is it ready yet?_

“You don't have enough juice yet,” Lucretia mumbles. She knows the voice in her head is the staff. It hasn't done anything bad, as far as she knows. She's begun to humor it, especially when she's drunk. She's on her forth glass of wine, so she's not quite there yet. That being said, she's had a lot more than four cups of wine all day. It's the past hour she's concerning herself with.

_We could do it now._

“Nope.” She pours herself another glass, considering the contents. Alcohol is yet another poison, is it not? She takes a sip. It's fruity and tangy in a way that a few of her favorite wines are, not sweet like a dessert wine, but just bitter like a good red should be.

_We could rule the--_

“Davenport?”

She ignores the staff in lieu of responding to the gnome now standing at her office door. “Do you want some, Davenport?” She asks, holding out the bottle.

“Davenport!” He holds out his hands.

She fills a glass with wine, for once caring less about water intake than she ought to. “Tell me when.”

The glass reaches about three-quarters full before Davenport says, “Davenport,” in a stern way. She refills her own glass and pushes the fresh one over so he can have a sip. He stands on the guest chair to reach the table.

“So how have you been?” She asks Davenport. She can tell the staff is trying to get a word in, and she tips back the glass she just poured and fills up again. Davenport watches with wide eyes.

“Davenport.” She sips his own wine. “Davenport.”

“Mhm. I've mostly been doing paperwork. You know how it is. Running a, well, whatever this is.”

Lucretia continues having a one-sided conversation with Davenport until he's three wines in. She hasn't even considered making him stop. She's drinking at twice the pace and she's fetched two more bottles.

“Long evening then,” Davenport says. Lucretia hiccups.

“You beeeeet.”

“Hmhm.” He finishes his fourth glass and she fills it back up.

“Staff's just, been, tellin me how to run my life lately. Like shut up and play music like you used to or whatever. I don't know. She's usually right. I shoud just. Listent o her.”

“Why am I here? Have I been here?”

“Hmhm. Yeah.”

“Wiiiiiiild.” Davenport slurs.

“Mhm.”

“Why are you crying?”

“Oh shit,” Lucretia says, putting a hand to her cheek. “Thas happening, isn't it.”

“Daven- yeah.”

“S funny. Alcohol is one of those poisons. Yanno.”

“No?”

“I'm making a list of poisons.” Lucretia slumps real low on her chair. “All the poisons I know. Especially ones I've eaten. Alcohol is a poison? Maybe I don't have it on the list. I should put it on the list. That's a great idea.”

“Yeah.”

“I'm gonna go to sleep.”

“S'a good idea,” Davenport says.

“Night.” She puts her head down on her desk and falls asleep right there. The staff starts singing as soon as she starts to sag, and lulls her in her slumber.

 

Johnann looks up from the scroll in surprise. “I thought you – I thought you weren't planning on erasing her?”

Lucretia takes another steadying breath. “No, it's time.” Everyone but Lucretia who was close to her is dead, now. No one will forget her who matters to her. She should have done this before, before Lucas died, but she was frightened-- what would he say?

And now, now she's sure she has family. Even if they're family that doesn't remember she's family to them, they're still family and she still loves them. They're not going to die on her any time soon.

She still feels so bad for sending them off on perilous missions. She wouldn't if she didn't know they can handle it. It's the most nerve-wracking thing, waiting for them to return. She hasn't sent them out in a little while, yet, though. Taking a deep breath before the plunge – besides, she's not one-hundred percent on the location of the chalice.

“Alright, well,” Johann sighs, slipping the scroll into the tank. “Bye, Maureen.”

Lucretia puts her hand against the glass in a silent farewell.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which Tuna is impatience to get this whole work into the universe.  
> Also, Uh, attempted suicide warning. Kinda. the actual intent of the incident is ambiguous. (And this one isn't the foremost reason for that tag, either.)

Taako finds a newspaper.

Well, it might be more accurate to say that Taako riffles through a wastebasket. The boys are in Neverwinter today, chilling and shopping. The day is starting to draw to a close, though, and Taako is done puttering around for the day. His feet hurt. He's bored, Magnus and Merle are shopping for … something, and the wastebasket was right there with its tempting depths. He finds a newspaper not far from the bottom, and lies down on a park bench to read it. A fashion headline caught his eye.

Even after he finishes the portion that interested him, Taako continues flipping through the pages. His eyes catch a headline that makes his heart stop, somewhere in the current events section.

MORE NEWS ON GLAMOUR SPRINGS.

It's a tiny little article, tucked away in the corner. It mostly just lists deaths. He throws the damn newspaper out again and rolls over onto his back. He doesn't need this. He doesn't need _any_ of this bullshit, and he probably deserves every second of it.

He doesn't know the chemical composition of Belladonna. He just doesn't. He never learned that anywhere. He couldn't have transmuted belladonna, anywhere. That doesn't mean he didn't kill those people, of course. He didn't transmute _belladonna_ , though. What a ludicrous thought! Why did he even think of belladonna to start with? He's never even _touched_ belladonna.

A bird flits by in a tree. It hops along a branch, just above him. Twitters, with another, identical bird. They sit next to each other on a branch. Something wrenches in Taako's chest, and he looks away from the birds.

Magnus and Merle come out of their nerd shop, and the group starts heading back in the direction of the field outside Neverwinter that they use for calling transport. He's quiet, thinking. He wants some elderberries.

“Hold on,” Taako says, stopping the group at a grocery. “I'll be right back.”

He finds the fruits section, picks up a handful or two of elderberries, and walks out with a nondescript paper bag in hand. Merle eyes it.

“What's that?”

“Just some stuff.” Taako shrugs.

“You've been awfully quiet,” Magnus says. “You doing okay?”

“I'm fine,” Taako says, swinging his umbrella a little. “Let's get back to campus, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Merle says. They head towards the edge of town again. Taako is acutely aware of the pain in his heels. Why did he wear _these_ shoes today? He's already thanking Oghma when the orb appears in the sky, and he takes his heels off as soon as he's flopped in one of the transport seats.

“I told you those shoes were a bad choice.”

“Shut up, old man,” Taako says, fixing his shirt. He puts the elderberries in his lap and his umbrella across his knees and leans back in his chair so his head hits the backrest. He wonders how good Magnus and Merle are at reading elven emotional expression.

 

Taako goes to the library. He puts the elderberries on his bureau, pulls on some boots that don't have ridiculously high heels, and heads upstairs. It's not super often that Taako does any sort of research, and to be honest he doesn't really love it when people knows he does research at all, but science fascinates him. He wants to learn exactly what goes into Belladonna, today. He wants to learn how to recreate Glamour Springs. After all, the best way to avoid something is to learn exactly how it happened.

Belladonna contains atropamine, a chemical which at first, only dilates the pupils, but can lead to lung seizure and death in greater quantities. A belladonna berry, or two belladonna berries, isn't enough to kill a single person. In fact, the adults at Glamour Springs ought to have been fine. Taako's heart beats double time in his chest, and he turns the page.

He didn't, he knows for sure, give anyone at Glamour Springs ten elderberries with their sample. And belladonna takes up to an hour to take effect. The folks he murdered were throwing up almost immediately, definitely sick right away. All of them were sick right away. That's not a belladonna reaction.

Whatever the poison was, it _wasn't_ belladonna. Taako puts the books back on the shelf and slips out of the library. He can't seem to wrap his head around why belladonna came to mind, though. He comes up static-side, like so many things these days. He pushes that question out of his brain and considers once more the chemical makeup of a belladonna berry.

Despite the clear evidence that it wasn't belladonna which killed half of Glamour Springs, Taako wants to try belladonna anyway. He wants to see what symptoms he'll get from eating that poison.

Gods almighty. He's not a fucking scientist. What's gotten into him? It doesn't matter, he decides, as he pours the elderberries onto a plate. He lies down on his bed and focuses his energy, carefully transmuting the fruit from one species to another. The appearance doesn't change much. He giggles a little, hysterically, and rolls the belladonna berries around on the plate.

There are three possibilities here. The first, is that he successfully transmuted Belladonna, and the berries in front of him are therefore, indisputably, deadly nightshade, and he'll have a reaction to atropamine poison. The second is that he transmuted something awful and he'll react the way the people of Glamour Springs did. The third is that he didn't transmute anything at all, and he'll have a nice little elderberry snack.

There's only one way to find out.

He only eats two berries, at first, but when nothing much happens after fifteen minutes he eats a third. The world goes vague after about thirty minutes, but he feels fine in every other respect. He eats a fourth.

He's fascinated, really, by the way he trembles. The things he sees. He eats another berry, and another. They're vaguely sweet like wine is sometimes. He remembers Lucretia drinking wine, at the bar. He eats another berry. The world shifts the way it does in his dreams, strange and bright and black at the same time. He watches the stars wink out. There aren't any stars in his bedroom.

He misses Lup. Who's Lup? He misses her. He wants to hug her.

He enjoys the way the berries pop open between his teeth. His heart fights to escape his throat again. There are worms in his brain now, digging into the soft flesh of his hands and feet. He moans and reaches out to slap away the apparition of a dying man, his mouth running with blood, eyes sallow. Barry Bluejeans smiles at him all of a sudden, good old Barry. He's coughing blood. It's fine though, he'll be back. He always is. He'd be ashamed. Taako isn't a very good scientist. He struggles for another breath, and then reaches down, and eats another berry. He's popped some of them with his elbow. Stupid of him to do this on his bed, he thinks, for a moment rational.

There are hands on him, all over him, pushing through his skin and bursting his organs open. Someone's talking from a distance and Taako screams. He hears a clatter and another yell. Someone talking again. He licks his lips. Is he babbling? He needs to shut up. He bites his lip, but he can't breathe so he's quickly gasping again. The world rocks gently. A bright light blinds him, and the world falls away.

 

Taako wakes up in his own bed, and he couldn't be more thankful. Imagine waking up in the infirmary and having to explain himself.

It doesn't help that he hurts. He hurts in every inch of his body, all over. His head pangs and throbs with incessant pain. He decides he's not going to training today, there's no way anyone can make him.

He wonders if he ate a fatal dose or not. How many berries had he gotten into his system before he passed out? He should have been keeping track. Really, though, by the end of the experience where his mind was being eaten alive by worms, he wasn't sure he had the energy to write anything down. Besides, he doesn't remember half of the hallucinations he had. He can't even accurately record those. Good riddance.

He rolls over on his bed and his stomach lurches. There's a trash can sitting by his head, oddly convenient. He vomits into it, then lays back on his bed, gasping.

Wait. Someone had to have moved his trash can. He doesn't keep it at the head of his bed.

His mind is fizzling out. He'll have to think about this later.

 

Taako wakes up again, this time with a headache burning through his skull. He doesn't feel so nauseous anymore, though, which is a plus. He lies in his bed, content to ignore the world, his limbs weighted down by sleep and probably illness. The dull afternoon sun filters in through his curtains. He blinks, eyelids sticking a little.

A few minutes later, Taako gathers the energy to push himself up. The pain in his head intensifies, making him groan.

“He's awake, I think.” Magnus's voice is muffled through the door. Oh hell no. Taako flops dramatically back on his bed, wincing when it creaks. They know he's awake for sure, now.

“Yeah.” Merle. Footsteps. Someone knocks.

“Go away, chucklefucks,” Taako groans. His voice is _far_ too raspy.

“Nope. Needa make sure you're okay. If you don't open this thing, I'm casting knock.”

“How do you even _know_ knock? No, there's no way you know that spell. You're not a wizard, Merle. Or a bard. Or a warlock. Fuck off.”

“No, I definitely know knock,” Merle says, sounding a bit bemused. “Didn't you teach it to me?”

“No I fucking did _not_.”

“Funny. Because I remember you teaching it to me. In. Oh pan, where were we? On a ship? I've… Okay, That doesn't add up.”

“Listen old man, you're giving me static. Shut up. The door's fucking unlocked, imbecile. You probably closed it yourself.”

The door handle turns and Merle enters the room, Magnus close behind. Magnus looks annoying levels of worried, and Merle looks bored. Bored is… fine.

“Come on, sit up,” Merle says, shuffling towards the bed.

“Nope. My head hurts.”

“That's your fault. Sit up.”

Taako sits up. Merle casts cure wounds, which, well, it helps a little, Taako supposes. His headache wanes, but now he can feel an ache in his joints instead. Stupid fucking cleric never uses any of his high spell slots.

“Oh come on, old man. I coulda slept that off.”

“No, we need to talk. Come out to the living room and eat something.”

“No.”

Magnus steps forward, still silent, and picks Taako up. Taako yelps. “Put me down, you ass!”

“No, Taako, come on. You poisoned yourself. We _need_ to talk about this.”

“Fuck you.”  
“Maybe later?”

“ _Fffffffuck_ you.” Taako stops fighting and crosses his arms, sullen.

Magnus deposits him on the couch and sits down in the chair across from it. Merle retrieves some oatmeal from the kitchen. “Come on. Eat this. Talk to us.”

Taako takes the bowl of oatmeal and picks at it. Merle watches him til he's satisfied he's eaten at least a spoonful.

“The fuck am I supposed to be talking to you _about_?”

“You fucking poisoned yourself! I wanna at least know why!! We can't have a suicidal team member. That's just bad all around.”

Taako glances at Magnus, who is once again silent. Taako's sure he's not the only suicidal team member. In fact, he gets the feeling all of them have thought about death before. Or maybe even tried to die. Or even, been comfortable and open to being killed. The ever present headache that trails him rears its ugly head as he thinks. He traces the lines of Merle's face with his eyes. Fifty seven deaths, Kravitz had said. But. But, that's not the Merle in front of him, is it? There must have been a mistake somewhere.

He wasn't even trying to kill himself last night, though. He just wanted to _know_.

“I just wanted to know if I could do it,” Taako says through a mouthful of oatmeal.

“What? Kill yourself?”

“No, transmute fuckin, elderberries into nightshade, dipshit.”

Magnus sighs. “Was this just a stupid wizard thing?”

Taako shoves another spoonful of oatmeal in his mouth. This shit is disgusting, but he's starving. “I guess?”

Merle groans. “Next time you decide to try something like that, don't test the poison on _yourself_. Less work for me. Give it to the kid or something.”

“Who, Angus? I'm not feeding Angus nightshade, are you insane?” Taako represses a tremor. What the fuck, old man?

“Fuck if I care. As long as I don't have to heal whoever it is I don't care.”

Taako scrapes the bottom of the oatmeal bowl with his spoon and chews his bottom lip. There's a scab where he must have bit it the other day. Why the hell does Merle hate Angus so much? He supposes he doesn't do the best show of loving Angus himself, either.

It doesn't matter. Magnus doesn't look worried anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't realize how many memory references there were in this chapter till I was publishing it. Whoof.


	10. Chapter 10

The voidfish's chambers are calming, she's found. Well, she found the voidfish calming years ago, but there's something about sitting on the floor in a big, echoing chamber that is even more relaxing. She leans against one of the pillars holding up the ceiling and lets herself nod a little.

“Oh, hey!”

Lucretia startles, her staff clattering to the floor. She hurries to pick it up and spies Magnus at the entrance of the room. _It's just Magnus._ That's fine. She is glad she grabbed her staff, though, because even Magnus is susceptible to thrall-- And, of course, Magnus might touch it, or hear it, realize it _has_ a thrall, and ask the wrong question. She has to keep the staff close.

“Hello, Magnus.” She leans back against the pillar again, staff back between her knees.

“What are you doing down here?”

Lucretia raises an eyebrow. “I could ask the same of you. I own this place.”

“I don't know, I like to keep the Voidfish company. He seems to like me.”

“Hmm.” Lucretia stares up at Fischer. They bob in their tank, not particularly attentive at the moment. They had been singing before, though whether it was just a way to occupy their time or actually a response to her presence, she doesn't know.

Fischer, of course, remembers Magnus. She's very glad that Fischer can't communicate with them, at least not much. Not enough to give up any useful information.

“So?”

“Hm?” Lucretia purses her lips and doesn't look at Magnus. She can sense him watching her.

“Why are you down here?”

“It's peaceful.”

“Okay, true.” He sits forward on his knees and looks up into the tank. “Were you the one who found the Voidfish?”

“Not exactly. Well, the person who did is… He left,” Lucretia decides. She's not sure how on earth she can talk about that without getting dangerously close to static territory.

“Where did you find him?”

“That's classified.”

“What was this other guy like?”

Lucretia can't stop herself from chuckling, tightening her grip on her staff. “You would have liked him,” she says, feeling so hollow that the sensation in her chest comes out in the tone of her voice. “He was, well, he was like if a bear and a dog had a human child.”

“Wow. So like me!” Magnus grins.

“Yes, he was,” she sighs in response.

They lapse into silence. It's a silence that Lucretia is unendingly thankful for. She finds herself nodding off against the pillar, blissfully free of thoughts. She hasn't felt this relaxed a long time. Both Fischer and Magnus are in the room, though. She supposes that helps. She should be more diligent. She doesn't have the energy to bother.

“Madam Director?”

“Hum?” She shakes away the sleepiness that had been encroaching.

“Can you give Taako some time off?”

Lucretia laughs. “He should ask me himself.”

“That's the thing, though! In this case, I don't think he will?”

“What do you mean?” She sits up a little straighter. Taako isn't one to refuse breaks. He's not the sort who works themself into the ground. She's that type, she _knows_ that type. Taako likes lounging and looking pretty.

“Well, he did something really stupid yesterday and he's not, like, healthy? But he's trying to pretend to be healthy. I think he's embarrassed.” Magnus wrings his hands.

“What exactly did he do, Magnus?” Lucretia puts on her Madam Director voice, because he's not giving her a straight answer and it's simultaneously frustrating and frightening.

“Uhh, he was messing around with some transmutation and decided to test it out on himself.”

“Really.”

“Yeah, he got some berries in town? And turned them into deadly nightshade. Idk why, he just did that I guess? Something to do with his past.”

Lucretia tightens her grip on her staff. “Deadly nightshade?”

“Yeah, I think so. That's what Merle says. And I mean, he's healed now or whatever, but he's like dead on his feet? I dunno.”

Lucretia tears out a notebook page with shaking fingers and writes.

_Taako,_

_If I see you at practice once this week I swear to every god in the pantheon that I will transfigure you into a wall._

_-Madam Director_

She rips the paper out of the notebook and hands it to Magnus. “Thank you for telling me.” She's starting to dissociate, which really sucks in this situation. Her fingers are tingling a little. She lets her head fall back against the pillar with a light thud.

“A whole week?” Magnus says from somewhere to her right.

“Belladonna poisoning isn't fun, even with clerical healing,” Lucretia says. Her voice rings through her skull. “I have a certain amount of experience.”

“Really? Do you know someone who was poisoned?”

“Yes.”

Magnus doesn't push it.

Lucretia watches the voidfish float in the tank, again, without really seeing it. She wonders how much Taako recalls about that year – hopefully nothing relevant. She wonders if that's why he was messing around with Belladonna. She hopes not, but at the same time, she's afraid he retained some connection to the drug, or he wouldn't have thought of it to start with. Lucretia has a bad feeling about Taako's history with poison.

When she finally stands up again, Magnus is long gone. She's not entirely sure how much time has passed, but she can still feel the wood grain of the bulwark staff under her hand. She can hear it whispering gentle platitudes in her mind, reminding her that things are in order, her mission is set to continue. She's getting closer every day, now. She's getting closer to where she wants to be. She walks to the voidfish's tank, pulling a little poem out of her notebook to give to it in thanks for its charity. Her poems are like little treats, because they're something Johann doesn't know about. She's not sure a voidfish can become unhealthy from overfeeding, though. She's not even sure if it's possible to overfeed something that lives on memory alone. She supposes, though, that if it is possible to do such a thing, she has done it. She fed the Voidfish the contents of an entire century. She fed two voidfish the contents of an entire century, and one of them also got to eat a whole war. And look how big it is, floating in the tank here! It's certainly many times her size. Lucretia recalls when the voidfish was hardly bigger than her own head.

She walks out the far entrance, summons the elevator, and heads to her office, shutting the door behind her. She needs to ground herself. She begins by putting the Bulwark staff against a wall and removing her shoes. She counts the number of fingers on her hands. She finds all the blue things in the room – of which there are many – and then, in order of frequency of color, works her way around to red, which occurs only a few times. She counts the books on her bookshelf. (ninety-nine condensed yearly journals on the first shelf, twenty-four on the second, fifty-three books of classic literature on the third.) She goes into her chambers, taking her boots with her, and makes herself a cup of tea.

Better. Better. Better better better. She doesn't let herself get up from her desk chair and get back to work til she's finished the entire cup. It's the most self-care she's allowed herself in either months or years, but she needs it. She needs to be able to keep working today, so she grants herself an hour's reprieve.

Sometimes, it's worthwhile. Not often. Sometimes, though. Sometimes.

 

Taako lets one leg dangle off the bed. He'd spent the past hour cleaning the remnants of belladonna out of his room – the bedsheets were toast, and the floor needed a thorough washing. Then he'd collapsed on a fresh fitted sheet without even bothering to put his extra comforter back on, shaking. He's too beautiful to be cleaning all day anyway.

He dozes for a little while, cold but too tired to fetch a blanket.

Someone knocks at his door.

“Mhwhat.”

“Taako, I have a note from the Director. Uh. About bedrest.”

“You fucking what?” Taako says, sitting up. His head spins. “Did you tell her – Magnus!” Taako gets up and throws the door open. “Oh my Gods there's gonna be so many stupid rumors aren't there.”

“We could come up with a reasonable excuse, right?” Magnus shrugs and hands him a note.

Taako's seen Lucretia's handwriting before. She doesn't usually _scribble_. It's still cursive, but it's sloppier than he's ever seen it. “Enthusiastic,” Taako mutters.

“What?”

“What did you do, hold her hand to the page and make her write? Her handwriting's never this messy.”

“No, I said the words Deadly Nightshade and she forced this into my hand as fast as possible.”

“She threatened to transfigure me.” Taako chuckles. He knows the Director is magical, extremely magical, but the confidence in her words feels unwarranted. “Is she even a wizard?”

“I think she might be multiclassed, to be honest,” Magnus says. “I've seen her shotgun a whole bottle of wine.”

“How on Faerun did she manage to get that powerful in under fifty years? How long are human childhoods again?” Taako hums. “Anyway fuck off, I'm going back to sleep. Or.” Taako sticks his tongue out. “Nevermind, Cha'boy's taking a shower.”

Magnus seems satisfied with that. “If you need like, a sandwich or something, just call me,” he says.

“You'd probably burn it or something.”

“Can't burn a sandwich.”

“You would anyway,” Taako puts the letter down on his bedside table. “Now fuck off.”

Magnus fucks off.

The shower is really nice. As Taako is washing his hair, he thinks about how nice it would be to have someone else to help. It's so much hair. He can't picture cutting it, though. It's his hair and he's keeping all of it, but there's so much of it and for some reason, he feels like he ought to have help. He can picture someone working lather along his scalp. He's about halfway done with his shower when he has to sit down on the floor.

This _sucks_.

Taako applies conditioner and then lets his head thunk back against the shower wall, water pounding on his skin till he can't feel the sensation anymore. He almost falls asleep but the water goes cold, jolting him back to full consciousness. Shivering, Taako turns off the shower, dries off, and rolls his hair up in a towel, throwing on a bathrobe and slinking back to his bedroom. He gives his hair a few minutes to dry, grabs a few blankets, and rolls himself up in them. He's hungry, but fuck if he's going to eat anything.

 

Lucretia sends Angus on a mission on his own, the next day. Just a little trip, to Glamour Springs. He said something about Glamour Springs a while ago, and she needs to have the answers to the questions his statements posed.

“Ma'am-- Isn't this invading Taako's privacy?” Angus asks, shouldering a backpack. He just put two and two together and realized she wants to find out if he was the chef from that incident.

“This has interfered with his work, so I wouldn't say so,” Lucretia says. “If you need anything, call me. I can get myself to your location very fast in a pinch.”

“Using an orb?”

“Oh, I have better means than that.” She smiles. “I trust you won't get unduly hurt out there, though, because it would be more risky for me to transport myself _and_ a passenger using those methods.”

“Is it some kind of teleport spell? Last time I checked those only work up to twenty meters if you're _good_.”

“It's modified,” Lucretia says. “I'm fairly good at spellgrafting, if I do say so myself.”

“Wow! You'll have to teach me someday,” Angus says. Then he does a double take. “I'm sorry, I mean I'd love if you could show me someday.”

“You're fine, Angus.” She ruffles his hair. “Off you go, now. It's a good half hour walk from the nearest safe landing spot to Glamour Springs.”

“Yes, Ma'am!” He salutes her. She chuckles.

She feels empathy for Angus. She too, was working at a very young age. She was alone, except for her agent, who was hardly a parent figure for her. She was a little older than Angus when she left home, though. Fourteen isn't that old in the long run.

Especially not to someone who's a century older than they'd like to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think this ones gonna end up being 14 chapters long. Will keep you posted. (loooong boy. rifp)


	11. Chapter 11

Angus comes back a few days later with more information than she knows what to do with. Forty people in Glamour Springs died in a poisoning event six years ago, and the cause of death was arsenic in every case. That makes sense, arsenic can be a fast-working poison. Belladonna is not a fast working poison, so it couldn't possibly have been the culprit anyway.

“I still don't understand why Taako is messing with Belladonna berries if Arsenic is what happened at Glamour Springs,” Angus says, laying out newspaper clippings in front of her.

Lucretia's thankful for her ambidexterity at times like these, because writing an account for both herself and Angus at the same time is much easier than writing one account and copying it over. He watches her work with something like awe on his face, his eyebrows starting to disappear into his hairline.

“I, uh, didn't know you're ambidextrous, Ma'am,” he says.

“Really? I've written using both my hands – albeit not at the same time – in front of you, before now.”

“I suppose I should pay more attention to that stuff, shouldn't I.”

“You're not required to be clever when you're not on the job, Angus.” She finishes up her accounts and pushes one across the table. “If you don't mind, I'll keep the newspaper clippings.”

“Yeah, that's fine,” Angus says. “As long as I know the sources, I can find them again if I need them.”

“Anything else you need?”

“No ma'am, well, actually, may I ask a question?”

“I mean, I suppose I won't know if the question is appropriate till you ask it, right?”

“That's- true,” Angus says. He chews his lip for a moment. “Okay, okay, you knew Maureen, right? Maureen Miller?”

“I knew all the Millers,” Lucretia says. “Except for Mr. Miller's wife, who was dead before I learned the family existed.”

“Before you knew they-- You know what, I'm gonna let that one slide,” Angus frowns. “I mean, you knew her like, you _liked_ her. You know?”

Lucretia sighs. “Angus, why are you asking me this?”

“Well, you erased her real late, and I… Hm.” He's switched to chewing on his finger. He's got that contemplative look that she remembers Davenport having when he was trying to figure something out-- and Davenport didn't often need to spend time figuring things out, just like Angus, so it hits her somewhere in the chest. “I don't know, I was just curious.” He grins at her, hops down off his chair and waves on his way out the door. “I'll see you later, Ma'am.”

“See you, Angus,” Lucretia smiles.

She needs a stiff drink.

 

Taako's looking very pale. The other two quickly debrief on what exactly the temporal chalice told them-- Magnus cries a little –but Taako refuses to explain what happened. He fiddles with the handle of the umbra staff and stares at anywhere but other people's faces. Lucretia dismisses Merle and Magnus.

“Taako.”

Taako grins – Lucretia almost winces, it's the weakest grin she's ever seen on his face. “Sup?”

“Would it be more comfortable to talk about what the chalice tempted you with in my office? It's a little more private.”

“I don't needa talk about it. You don't need that info for your, bureau shit, right? We're chill.”

“Taako.” She leans forward. “I can tell you're not okay.”

“Since when did you get so good at readin' my emotions?”

Lucretia allows herself a tiny, hysterical chuckle. “I could ask the same of you.”

Taako swallows, probably because he doesn't have an answer. He knows he knows things he shouldn't about her, intuits details that should be mysteries. “I'm not usually good with people.”

“Come on, let's go to my office,” Lucretia says.

“Lissen, I really don't need t--”

“ _Let's go to my office_ ,” Lucretia says, with more force, standing to her full height. They're the same height – she's only taller than Taako because her heels give her a few inches. (And he's slouching a little, though the slouch vanishes when she straightens.)

Taako follows Lucretia to her office, but lingers just in the door. “Come in and close the door,” Lucretia says. “Have a seat.”

Taako does as he's told, folding his legs and fidgeting with the skin around his fingernails.

“Taako.”

“Hm?” He glances at her, then goes back to messing with his cuticles.

“Let's start with the simple question. What did the chalice offer you?”

“I coulda taken Sazed on as like, a real chef. Nothin' big.”

“You're having a very big reaction to it. Can you start from the beginning?”

“Alright, alright, alright-- fucking ffine. Listen. I poisoned a whole shitton of people at my last gig as a chef, yeah? Killed like forty people or whatever. They uh, I- I thought I fed them deadly nightshade. Because. There was, like, a garnish on the chicken, Uh, elderberries or what the fuck ever, and, I do transmutation right? But. My uh, my helping hand I guess, Saz-Sazed, he, well, I guess he wanted to poison me? Holy shit,” Taako stops, laughing hysterically. “Holy shit, he probably wanted to kill _me_.”

Things click together in Lucretia's mind. Taako always had conflicting inferiority and superiority complexes, but leaving him alone and in charge for years, stripping it from him and leaving the blame on his shoulders – of _course_ his coping mechanisms are shining through more. She folds her hands to keep them from shaking, to keep from reaching across the desk and wiping the tears budding in Taako's eyes out of his lashes. She'd love to offer him a cup of coffee, offer to brush and braid his hair the way _someone_ was always doing when he needed comfort. Usually Lup or Barry, but she'd done it a few times, of course.

“Taako?” Lucretia says, when she can trust her voice is schooled. It's softer than it was before, despite any attempt to bring back her authoritative air, but she decides that's reasonable. There are a lot of things she wants to say, wants to ask, right at this moment. She settles on one that's easy, unobtrusive. “Would you like some tea?”

“Yeah,” Taako says. “Man, it's a good thing you- you don't mind murder, up here, cause, Hah. I didn't know that walking into this, huh?”

“I would never blame you for being framed for the deaths of forty people, Taako,” Lucretia sighs. Then she gets up and calls Davenport to make tea.

Taako's giving her a calculating look when she sits back down. She raises an eyebrow.

“How did you know it was forty people?”

“Ah.” Lucretia chuckles. She's glad she has an excuse for this. “After you, ah, ingested Belladonna, last month, I ran some investigations.”

Taako crosses his arms. “That's really intrusive of you, _Lulu_.”

Lucretia winces at the use of that name. “It was interfering with your health.”

“Why the fuck do you care about my _health_?”

“Taako, even you can't do your job if you're dead. And there's unfortunately only three people I know of who can reclaim grand relics. You are incredibly important – nearing on _vital_ to this organization and to the world.”

Davenport shows up with the tea. Lucretia thanks him, setting it down on the desk on top of her papers. Taako uncrosses his arms and takes a sip from his mug. “Yeah, I guess,” he says.

Lucretia inhales the scent of the steam wafting from her mug and takes a careful sip, hand running lightly up the staff. It's trying to talk, again. She knows what the words are, but she's not processing them as words. Listening to the staff is like breathing, now.

“We're so close,” Lucretia sighs.

“Yea, only two more to go,” Taako says. Her brain stutters-- two? Oh, oh yeah, she supposes she never lied to the boys about how many relics existed.

“Just two more.” She takes another sip of tea. “You're dismissed, whenever you'd like to go. I'm going to do some paperwork.”

“Kay,” Taako says. He puts his feet up on her desk and hangs out for another twenty minutes or so, pouring himself a second cup of tea. It's oddly companionable. Her chest aches a little when she realizes that yes, she did miss this. She missed _companionship_. Especially, especially companionship with her _family_.

 


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Delicious. Finally some fucking taakitz.

It's like coming down from a belladonna high.

One moment, her world is a haze of half-truths and platitudes. The next, she feels like she's seeing in high definition for the first time in a decade. The world around her spins. The staff is panicking – how did she get free? Why is she free? That little voice that's been in the back of her mind for years now is louder than ever, but for the first time, she can ignore it. She's defected. She's broken free of the rules.

Lucretia leans back – almost staggers – almost lets the staff drop from her fingers. The staff is screaming. It's screaming and screaming and screaming, knives in her ears and her chest, making her head hurt.

_Shut u_ _p,_ she thinks.

It obeys.

Lucretia steels herself, tightens her grasp, and stops channeling the spell.

_No more._

Before she can stop it, a little noise of surprise works its way past her lips. “Huh.”

She's reminded of where she is when Barry and Lup echo her. Who she's with. What this means. Lup. Barry. Taako, Magnus, Merle, Davenport, _Lup_ –

Taako's saying something. She forces herself to focus on the words, on the world around her, on the people in her life. It hasn't hit her yet that they probably hate her for what she's done. In this moment, she's blissfully free of poison.

For the first time in a decade, she can _listen_.

 

Belladonna.

_They burst through the dungeon doors, and Taako was almost sick when he saw Lucretia there-- shaking, paler than he'd ever seen her, eyes glassed over and leaking slow tears. Her mouth and the floor and the cheek she was leaning on were all coated in violet bile. As he watched, she convulsed again, hands reaching for nothing._

_He rushed to her side. Cupped her face in one hand._

_“D'you think she's conscious?” Lup asked, a little waver in her mostly-steady voice. The kind of waver that only Taako could catch._

_“Iunno, he croaked, after a moment. “Her eyes are moving, I think so. But shes super not okay. Fuck, Lup, we found her, but I dunno if she's gonna make it.” He shook her shoulder, as gently as he could manage. “Hey. Lucy. Ya in there?”_

_Lucretia groaned, eyes flicking back and forth. The groan caught on something inside her and she convulsed, but this convulsion felt more like a sob to him. She definitely wasn't present enough to answer him, which was scary, but at least she managed to respond somewhat. She was still in there, somewhere. Tucked away in a corner of her mind. He wondered what she was thinking. Was she in pain? How much pain? Where did it hurt? Could he do anything to help her? “Sounds like she's at least somewhat aware,” he told Lup, and the look on Lucretia's face almost formed a smile in that moment. It was a shaky, unhappy smile, while it lasted. Again, he wondered what she was thinking._

_He slid his arms under her shuddering form and lifted her from the floor. She was light as a feather in his arms, and Taako wasn't exactly known for keeping himself strong. “Woah, she's deffos lost some weight.”_

_“Poor kid.” Lup's face was an echo of a pout._

_They rushed out of the building, up the stairs, out the front door, down the front steps. They hurried through the town, not bothering to apply any glamour or protection. Lucretia made a little pained noise, her fingers finding a fold in Taako's shirt and gripping it tight. She licked her lips as Taako watched, an expression of confusion blooming there. Her fingers tightened. Then, she closed her eyes, pressing her face into Taako's chest. Taako shifted her so he was holding her more close against her body. He wasn't quite used to physical contact, at the time. It felt good to hold someone so close._

_They got past the city, to where they could feel the wind in earnest, and Lucretia hiccuped a little, tears rolling down her face again. Taako wished he had an extra hand to wipe them away._

_Instead, he tried the verbal reassurance. “Hey, Lucy, it's okay, I gotcha.”_

_He didn't expect her to hear._

_She nodded anyway._

 

Taako jolts awake, realization hammering like a second heartbeat in his chest. Oh. Oh oh _oh oh_. Of course, he'd forgotten about that year. Belladonna, of course it has meaning. Who just, fabricates a reason for something? The symptoms at glamour springs had nothing to do with belladonna. Belladonna takes as long as an hour to set into your system, and a fatal dose for an adult is far more than the few berries on the chicken. At worst, the kids and some of the elderly would have died, at Glamour Springs. Not the whole fucking town.

There's a body next to him in bed, body cool and chest unmoving, dead like the people Taako had watched die all those years ago. Dead like all the bodies of all his friends on the floor, gutted or frozen or charred or simply _lost_ in one way or another. For the first time, because of Kravitz, Taako can find some comfort in that, though. He wraps his arms around Kravitz's broad chest and breathes in the soft smell that lives in his shirt.

Kravitz makes a cute little noise, and breathes in, expanding in Taako's embrace. “Love?” he says, his voice delightfully sleepy. Taako nuzzles the space between his shoulderblades.

“Hey bone boy,” Taako mumbles, not quite capable of keeping the sadness out of his tone.

“Did you have a nightmare?”

“Just a memory dream,” Taako says. “Realized some stuff.”

“Do you wanna talk about it?”

“MMMMMmmmaybe. In a bit. Yeah.”

Taako listens to the sound of his own breathing for a little bit, still pressed against Kravitz's back. The clock in the living room ticks quietly. A soft breeze sighs through the grass. The bedsheets rustle as Kravitz shifts.

“Whaddaya remember from like, the twenties? In the century? From the broadcast?”

“Not an awful lot,” Kravitz says.

“Do you remember cycle 25? It was like. A paragraph. Somethin like. _The twins saved me from a dungeon._ ”

“No, I don't remember that one. It _was_ an awful lot of information to take in in a few minutes.”

“Fair, true. Well. Remember how I said that someone tricked me into thinking I poisoned a whole town with deadly nightshade, a while back? Well. Uh.” Taako licks his lips. “Well, I came up with the belladonna idea. That was on me. And I was just dreaming about cycle twenty five, which, tee bee ache, Lucy didn't erase all that much of. She didn't write much of it down. Which I get, like, she had a hard year. That was a hard year. Yeah. Uh.”

“You're rambling, babe.”

“Yeah, okay, anyway, so. Yeah, I mean, I think that's why I thought, oh yeah, it musta been Belladonna. You know.”

“Is that upsetting you?” Kravitz rolls over, brushing some hair behind Taako's ear.

“Probably,” Taako huffs. Kravitz doesn't ask for an explanation. Taako wonders, sometimes, how much of this he understands. 

“Did she survive that cycle?”

“Yeah. She was fine.” Taako giggles. “Istus bless Merle's healing, or whatever.”

Kravitz touches his forehead to Taako's collarbone and hums.

It's a breath of fresh air, really. Knowing is. He's weighed down by his memories, but lifted all the same from the fog he never wanted to endure.

 


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> suicide warning.

As soon as Lucretia is free of the chaos of reconstruction, as soon as things are clean and tidy and sorted as best as she can be sure they ever will be, she retreats. She doesn't return to her office, or her private chambers. Those feel breached, unsafe. She goes to the little cabin that she and Davenport had lived in for those years at the beginning, before Maureen. Obviously, Davenport knows about it, but no one else does, and she's not worried about Davenport seeking her out.

As it is, she stands in front of the door just a little too long, feeling like an outsider, an intruder in her own space. Opening the door, finally, removing her shoes like she's done a million times before. There's still clothes in the dresser, but they're dusty, linens on the bed, but they're mouse-eaten and gross. She strips the place down, makes a pile of things to keep and a pile of things to throw away. Her suitcase sits in the middle of the living room all night, untouched.

It feels wrong here, now, without Maureen. She'd lived in this house before she met Maureen, of course, but it hadn't been much of a home, then. Just a place to stay. She misses curling into Maureen's neck late at night and telling her she loved her as she fell asleep. She misses the intimacy of their relationship, and the peace in it. Yes, she was still trying to save the world, but at least Maureen was safe from the visceral terror of the hunger. With Maureen, she felt a little less sullied in her past. It wasn't as bone-deep a love and a companionship as the crew had been near the end, but it was a much stronger bond than any she had made since. Any she had now.

She would cry, she thinks, if she had the energy.

Once she's sure that the place is clean, habitable at some level, she puts the stained mattress back on the bedframe in her old room and pulls a pair of mercifully unsullied bedsheets onto it. She puts her suitcase in the corner of the room and falls fully clothed onto the bed.

She wakes up later, not sure how much later, in a fog. (Still not wrapped around Maureen's warm body.) Lucretia climbs out of bed and peels off her clothes and showers until she runs out of the spell slots to heat the water. She nibbles on some pistachios she dragged with her, and then climbs back into bed, still a little damp. She's exhausted beyond belief, beyond comprehension. She feels like she's been stretched thin and snapped back like a rubberband. She stares at the wall until she drifts off again.

This continues for about a week. She eats little, and never wakes for more than four hours. She gets a few chores done, but mostly she just lies on her bed or on the floor in various positions, and stares into space. Her limbs feel heavy. Often, so do her eyelids. Her head aches gently but incessantly.

Finally, she musters up the energy to pull her boots back on, grab her wallet and walk into town. She feels like a ghost. She casts a glamour before entering, because she doesn't really want to be found. Not now. Not yet.

Neverwinter is still under construction. The streets are bustling again, though, people trying their best to go about their daily business despite rubble and the occasional downed building or fractured street. There's a certain amount more accommodation, more _caring_ here than she remembers. She smiles when a vendor sneaks an extra piece of bread into a kid's order with a pat on the head. It's better here, now. Trauma, she has learned, often begets kindness, especially where the cause of the trauma is gone. It's a terrible thing, but a fact.

She almost feels bad, then, buying belladonna from a vendor. She just wants to get a little high. Maybe she'll call Lup, tell her she's feeling better. She tips the man behind the counter and gives him the warmest smile she can muster.

There's a reason why Lucretia doesn't like being alone. There's a reason why she keeps herself as busy as possible. There are wolves in her head, telling her terrible, terrible things. They didn't go away, even, as she had hoped, when the staff was gone. If anything, they'd gotten louder. The staff encouraged her and egged her on, so she supposes that should have been no surprise. The wolves, though, they whisper nasty truths in her ear.

She knows this – whatever she's doing – it's not actually because she wants a high. Belladonna is not a safe or efficient high. If she wanted to be high, she could have bought marijuana. She doesn't want to sit in her own truths, so she fabricated herself some lies.

She hadn't exactly thought very hard about this. Well, beforehand. Before the staff let her go, she'd still had the little sinister words in the back of her brain. She'd wanted Taako to shoot her, on some level. She still does. She's not going to encourage that, though. She knows what that looks like, and it's never appropriate. Not that what she's doing now is appropriate, but it feels less selfish. Less exploitative. She hopes she can disappear like a breath of wind, and fall apart like the old bones of her old house in the woods.

She will call Lup, though. Might as well. As long as she seems fine, there's no reason why calling Lup will interfere with what she has planned.

Lucretia pours herself a glass of wine, sits down on the couch, and calls Lup.

“Hey Lucy!” Lup says when she picks up. “How ya feeling?”

“Fine,” Lucretia says. She leans back on the couch. This has to go well. It has to.

“That's good to hear. You disappeared for a bit there – didn't want to help with reconstruction?”

Lucretia doesn't respond. What is she supposed to say? No, I didn't want to help? I did but I ditched you anyway?

“Sokay, babe, there's still plenty to do whenever you plan on getting back. When is that, anyway?”

“I don't know?” She keeps as much of the waver as possible out of her voice, but she's not perfect. “I didn't, ah. Time this one.”

“Alright, call me back when you know. Or whatever.”

“Okay,” Lucretia says, knowing it's uncharacteristic. She doesn't really want to lie. She doesn't want to say that she'll do something she won't do.

Lup hangs up, and Lucretia reaches for the bag of belladonna berries. Why did she decide to do this _this_ way? Because it's familiar? She tenses as she uncurls the top of the bag, peering inside. They look just the way she remembers.

It's a very easy death. She knows this. It takes a long time for belladonna poisoning to show symptoms. Insidious, in any other situation. She fetches her favorite novel, sits down, and opens to her favorite scene. She eats berries like popcorn til the whole bag is gone.

A bird chitters outside her window.

It becomes hard to focus on her book when her pupils dilate, and she puts it down, trying to enjoy the calm afternoon. It's not working. Her breath is caught in her throat. She's too close to where she was before. She just calmly downed an entire bag of belladonna berries and she hasn't eaten anything but pistachios in days.

She hurries out of the room to puke in the toilet, feeling incredibly stupid. There are much better ways to die than panicking with her face pressed against the linoleum tile of the bathroom floor, panting and gasping for air. She feels like she's going blind, she thinks she might be. Maybe it's just the hunger, wrapping around her like it did at her final stand. Maybe she never woke up in Jeffandrew's train. Maybe she never made it back to faerun. Maybe she's still wrapped in writhing, pitilessly restrained tendrils of pure darkness and glitter. There was never any hope for her anyways. She tries to gasp and almost chokes on her own vomit, her throat constricting in a panic.

Maybe she never left that chamber. Maybe she's dying, and the twins won't ever come. After all, she hallucinated them, right? She's seen so many things.

Time stutters. Her skin vibrates against her muscles. Lucretia breathes as best she can, but it's becoming more and more difficult to do so.

Then she feels a cool hand on her shoulder. She can't see, she can't see a goddamn thing but – she's definitely imagining a hand, it hasn't changed – she's not sure what she's thinking. She hears a voice. She's not entirely sure what the voice is saying. It's contorted, but it sounds familiar anyway. And then the voice is a song, and the song is sweet and gentle and it washes away – something. Something like pain?

Lucretia sighs. The world is still spinning and wobbling underneath and within her. She hears the voice again, and strong arms lifting her from the ground. A gentle song, again.

Oh.

Bard song.

The world slips away.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! Update.
> 
> So i JUST learned it's lucretia week. Long story short, I am veeeery busy and stressed right now, so chances are you won't get much in the way of updates once I get all of belladonna out. I do have another big project on the back burner and a couple of one shots I could polish up and post, but I don't know if I'll have the time/energy even for that.
> 
> That being said: I DO have a very big project on the back burner. Hopefully once I get all my webcomic stuff and homework done, I'll be able to put some energy into it.


	14. Chapter 14

Lucretia wakes up cocooned in pillows, bodies, and blankets.

Well, wake up is a strong word. She becomes aware of her own sense of touch. She can hear her breathing, a raspy, unhappy sound. She can feel warmth pressed against her, skin against her own. She can feel the texture of a blanket on her cheek. She can feel the give of pillows underneath her and in between her and the other bodies.

For now, the sensation is meaningless. She drifts off again.

 

When Lucretia wakes up again, she feels a heavy calm. She knows something terrible has happened, but she doesn't want to recall it, not yet. So she lays in the cocoon of blankets and pillows and warmth and breathes in the scent of lavender perfume.

Someone's talking, somewhere close by. She can focus on that.

“….Could be a nice place if it had a bit more paint.”

“It was.”

“Hm.”

Some calm. The sound of something cool hitting a very hot pan. Something underneath Lucretia shifts, and she realizes that she's curled up in someone's arms. They're snoring a little. With this realization, unfortunately, comes the realization that her body and her head are aching. It's not as bad as she remembers it being in the century – muted. Maybe she got more healing this time, or maybe she just hasn't completely woken up. Either way, she's content to burrow her face further into the body encapsulating her.

It takes a few more minutes to realize that this body is cooler than it ought to be. Whoever it is is breathing, but they're too cold to be alive. She blinks her eyes open, and discovers that she' sitting in Kravitz's lap with Magnus's head on her knees, wrapped up in something fluffy and piled with pillows. Kravitz is all tuckered out, his head on his shoulder. One of his dreads tickles her nose. She shifts a little, and Magnus looks up from his book.

“Look who's awake!” he exclaims, cheerful as ever.

“Hello,” Lucretia says. “Why am I sitting on Kravitz?”

“He fell asleep singing to you and we didn't have the heart to move him,” Magnus shrugs, removing his head from Lucretia's knees. The pillow which had been in between them slides onto the floor.

“I didn't know he was a bard,” Lucretia hums.

“Handy. First person who got here is someone with healing magic, right?” He swallows nervously. “What exactly happened, anyway?”

“I could ask the same of you,” she says. “I, uh. Thought I was alone. I wasn't expecting anyone to show up.”

“Lup said you sounded weird. Took a little while to figure out where you live, though, till we thought to ask Cap'n'port, because you just vanished?”

“Mngh.” Lucretia lets her head thud against Kravitz's chest. She's still pretty tired, but Kravitz isn't exactly a space heater. Tired. Hungry. Holy shit, how long has it been since she ate anything? She sits up, then stands, maybe a little too fast, and has to brace herself against the wall behind Kravitz. It's enough to rouse him a little.

“No, T'ko, come back,” Kravitz mumbles, ears drooping.

“Not Taako,” Lucretia hums. “Wake up and catch the worm, reaper man. Or whatever it is kids say these days.”

Kravitz blinks at her for a second, flabbergasted. “Oh. Uh. Good morning, Lucretia.”

“Is it morning?” she asks Magnus.

“Yeah, actually,” he says. He's gone back to reading his book, though he still manages to shoot her another worried glance. This is too easy. They've done this too much before. Her crew, her family is so used to being hurt that they almost don't bother to question it.

Kravitz, however, isn't part of the little family, and as a result, doesn't instantaneously know what is going on. “Are you alright? What was- What were you doing yesterday, anyway? That was, well.”

“I'm fine, thank you,” Lucretia brushes her robes off theatrically, thankful she has the energy for some form of facade. “I haven't eaten a real meal in a whole week, though, at least, and I would like to do that. Did I hear someone cooking earlier, or was I imagining things?”

“I've been asleep.” Kravitz shrugs.

“Taaks is making sausages,” Magnus says.

“Ah.”

Lucretia walks into her kitchen. Davenport's sitting at her seat at the table and Taako is fussing over a pan on the stove.

“Eeeey, you're up!” Taako grins. His grin isn't a real Taako grin, just a carefully crafted facade. “Want some food?”

“Maybe not sausage. I've eaten nothing but pistachios for a handful of days now.”

“Geesh, Lucy.” Taako wrinkles his nose. “Ill make some soup.”

“Thank you.” She sits down at Davenport's spot at the table. The chair doesn't fit her as well as it could, but it doesn't really matter.

The room is heavy and silent for a little while, full of slow and molasses-sticky tension. Lucretia tries to make herself comfortable in Davenport's chair and eventually gives up. Taako pours sausages onto a plate and stirs the little soup pot he put on, adding stock and vegetables. She watches him grow tenser and tenser with the atmosphere, his ears flattening themselves slowly into his neck.

“Lucy.”

“Yes?”

“Yanno, you don't have to go it alone, right? Like you've done that. You've done that a lot, without necessarily asking first. But. You have _people_. I know you need space, for a bit, but don't put an entire plane between us n you, yeah? Specially not permanently. That's no fun.”

Davenport stands up and leaves the room. Lucretia puts off responding to Taako by watching his tail flick around the corner.

“Okay,” she says, finally.

Taako huffs. His ears relax.

A few more minutes pass, the silence less tense. Lucretia switches chairs because frankly, she does not have the build of a gnome and she's a woman in her fifties and her back hurts.

Barry comes wandering in with a pillow under his arm. “Taako, where did you want--”

“Living room, Babe.”

“Thanks.” Barry disappears again. Lucretia feels like putting her head down on the table. Her stomach growls noisily.

“Soup's almost ready, Lucy-lu,” Taako murmurs, his voice sweet. It doesn't even sound like the sweetness is sarcastic. Lucretia feels _bad_ , viscerally. In her bones. Guilty.

The soup is good. It's heavenly, actually, it's Taako's cooking, she hasn't had that in so long that it hurts. She forces herself to eat slow, though, because she starts feeling nauseous just a few spoonfuls in and she doesn't want to regurgitate the only sustinence she's had in days. It takes her half an hour to finish the small bowl, hands trembling.

Barry comes back in before she's entirely done and hovers nearby, leaning on the wall. When she puts the last spoonful in her mouth, he takes the bowl to the sink.

“Do you wanna – we have a thing, in the living room,” Barry says, standing just that awkward distance away that he always does. (She missed Barry. She missed Taako and Magnus. She missed _all_ of them.)

“What is it?”

“Just come look?”

Lucretia nods and stands. Taako follows them out, she notices. She doesn't comment on this.

The living room is full of pillows. Just absolutelyfucking FULL of pillows. And literally every IPRE member is in the room, even Davenport, even Lup, hovering uncomfortably near the couch. Every crew member and Kravitz, though that doesn't negate her point.

“Cuddle pile?” Magnus grins.

“I should shower,” Lucretia says. She feels a little dizzy. Did they do this for her? Did they just move an existing pile of blankets to her place, because she wasn't at her best?

“Well then, go shower. This'll be waiting.”

“Hmhm.” Lucretia finds herself a spare pair of clothes before retreating to the solitude of the bathroom. She's swimming, just a little bit, in the intensity of the past few days. She lets water hit her face relentlessly in an attempt to pull her mind back into her body, and fails. She cleans herself off mechanically, dresses mechanically, and walks back out to the living room.

They're still all there. They're _all there._ She doesn't know what she was expecting. Maybe she thought it was an apparition or a joke. “Hi,” she says, feeling stupid.

“Come here,” Magnus says, opening his arms. He's holding a big green blanket in between them. She stares at it for a moment. That would, actually, be really nice. She's exhausted. When did she get so tired? She can't remember, but she walks over to Magnus and lets him wrap her up in the blanket. Someone plops down on her other side and pulls her close against their chest. Lup sits cross-legged at her head. A pillow lands on her thigh, and she sees Merle. She can hear Taako quietly talking to Kravitz somewhere close. She sighs.

“Hey, don't cry, Lucy,” Lup says, reaching to run an ethereal finger bone over her cheek, not touching her skin. “You'll be okay.”

Lucretia hiccups and feels Magnus's arms tighten around her. “Wow,” she says. She's spinning, dizzy with the attention. There's _so many people_ here. So many people here who love her. It feels like the century all over again.

With that, she drifts off to sleep.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally finished!  
> Irony: this 42,000 word two-part series was supposed to be a oneshot.   
> Hope u enjoyed! Comments and kudos still and always appreciated.


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